


Strange Visitor (From Another Time)

by Niitza



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: A Severe Lack Of Self-Awareness, Aliases, Alpine the Cat, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Journalism, Angst, Avengers Aren't Known, Bucky's Dick Knows What's Up Before He Does, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Colleagues - Freeform, Denial of Feelings, Dick Neglect, Do not post to another site, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, HYDRA Reveal, Humor, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, Inaccuracies About Amish People, Internalized Homophobia, Internet Fandom, Investigations, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Nomad Steve Rogers, Oblivious Bucky Barnes, Or: The Fantastic Story Of A Man Completely Out Of Touch With His Own Dick, Reporter Bucky barnes, Reporter Steve Rogers, Shrunkyclunks, Slow Burn, Some Fluff, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Wet Dream, Work-Life Balance, assholes in love, vigilantes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:35:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 51,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22269529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niitza/pseuds/Niitza
Summary: James Barnes, rising star reporter of theNew York Bulletin, has a plan. One, find out all there is to know about New York's newest vigilante Nomad, starting with his true identity. Two, write a masterful piece about it. Three, win a Pulitzer and become the envy of all his peers. Four, enjoy.Or, you know, something like that.One thing's for certain, though: he sure as hell isn't going to let that fucking asshole newbie Grant O'Connor steal his spotlight.-Or: theLois & Clark: The New Adventures of SupermanAU no one asked for.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 505
Kudos: 996





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes to start with:
> 
> 1) This fic is pretty much the proof that I watched too much Lois&Clark during my formative years - but at least I had a lot of fun writing it. I hope you will enjoy reading it! :)
> 
> 2) **The fic is complete** and is 9 chapters long. Posting will happen every other day, and so should be done two weeks from now, on January 29th.
> 
> 3) Lots of thanks to the Discord people for cheerleading and helping me brainstorm a few things (Nomad/Falcon portmanteau, anyone?) and stay motivated despite this fic turning out to be 3 to 4 times longer than I expected. And even more thanks to [Layersofsilence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence) for their continuous encouragements and enthusiasm and precious advice regarding the importance of tags (you will know what I mean :P) - and also for beta-ing this thing despite its unexpected length.
> 
> Enjoy!

Barnes was returning from the break room after having fetched his mid-morning cup of coffee when he saw the guy for the first time. His first impression was of _tall_ and _blond_ , quickly followed by _awkward_ , given how the man kept his hands tucked inside his pockets and his broad shoulders hunched. He was trailing after Lawson, who was quite clearly showing him around the office.

"Who's that?" Barnes asked, stopping by Anderson's chair.

"New hire," Anderson replied without even looking up from the document he was reading. He rarely needed his eyes to know exactly what was going on around him.

"I wasn't aware we were taking on anyone new." Given how tight a ship their editor-in-chief, Elle Richmond, ran, they would've known about it if that had been the case.

Anderson simply shrugged. "Maybe he's here to replace Bell while she's on maternity leave."

Barnes looked at the dubious combination of woolen trousers, tucked-in checkered shirt and leather jacket the man was sporting and seriously doubted that _that_ was qualified to run a fashion column in any way, shape, or form, even temporarily. Still, all he said was, "Maybe," before returning to his own desk. He didn't have time to care: he had two pieces due before the end of the week and a slew of other topics to investigate.

Besides, if the man was anything more than a temp or a tech, destined to stick around the main office, they'd all find out who he was sooner or later.

-

Barnes was right, of course.

Within two days, he knew that the man's name was Grant O'Connor and that he'd been hired to join the investigative team on a permanent basis. However, the question of what he was meant to write or what credentials had prompted his recruitment remained unanswered.

One would've thought that the employees of a newspaper famous for its investigative pieces would've done better when it came to finding out about the new member in their midst. But a lot of them didn't like to turn their methods of enquiry onto their own colleagues—or so they claimed, to disguise the fact that, when it came to in-office business, they'd much rather go the tried and true route of gossiping at the coffee machine.

Barnes didn't partake in such rituals much, but he did regularly make his way to the break room for his necessary coffee refills. Through these he learned more than he wanted to know about O'Connor's broad shoulders, about his deep voice, about the hilarious broad Brooklyn accent he fell into whenever he was distracted or surprised, about how he'd effortlessly carried the box containing his things up the stairs just to let an elderly couple have exclusive use of the elevator.

Somewhat handsome, quirky, and a gentleman. It sounded too good to be true—and so Barnes waited for the other shoe to drop.

-

He didn't have to wait long.

O'Connor was present at the team’s next meeting. Elle introduced him, briefly. Given that she wasn't one to hand out excuses for people to tell their life story, all O'Connor had the time to do before they began was smile and say, "Pleasure to meet you all."

After that, the meeting ran as usual. People reported on their progress regarding this or that story—as always Barnes had a couple big articles cooking, although they were less advanced than he would've wanted—then moved on to pitching new topics they believed ought to be looked into. Suggestions were made, leads discussed, advice given. People volunteered to cover this and that. Some topics, though, Elle assigned herself.

One of those was about a burgeoning scandal surrounding a private clinic where it appeared that for years patients who'd thought they were getting their vaccinations had actually been injected with nothing but a saline solution—innocuous, but also entirely ineffective. As a consequence, a fair number of childhood diseases had popped up where they shouldn't have: a boon for anti-vaxxers arguing that the procedure wasn't reliable, and a warning flag for health authorities. Yet the latter hadn't managed to do much more than launch a half-hearted investigation that still hadn't yielded any results, let alone conclusions. Except that now a former clinic worker had come forward, blowing the case wide open with her testimony.

It was a great topic. A lot of work, too, given that the entire investigation remained to be done. Was this a facility-wide trickery or just the doings of one department head, one doctor, one head nurse? Why had they done this? With what consequences, at what scale? What did the patients—the victims—make of it, what were they planning to do? What about the Public Health Department? What part had the debate surrounding vaccination played in this affair? And so on. The possible angles of approach were countless, and Barnes would've loved to dive into them.

He was under no illusion that he would, though. Swamped as he was, it couldn't go to him. But maybe, he thought as he gazed absently at his notes, if he played his cards right, if he managed to get a few of his articles done quickly, if nothing huge came up in-between, maybe then he could hitch a ride, help whoever ended up with it. It'd probably be Urich or Mendez, and they never minded when Barnes butted in.

But then Elle said, "O'Connor, you take it."

Barnes snapped his head up so fast he felt a twinge.

-

"What the fuck, Elle?"

It came out louder than Barnes had intended, but given that he'd had to wait until the reunion was over and Elle back in her office with the door closed to ask, he wasn't quite surprised. Or rueful.

Elle's faintly raised eyebrow told him at once that maybe he should be. She didn't even bother to look up from the papers on her desk as she asked, "'What the fuck', what?"

Barnes hadn't gotten where he was by backing down, though. "Since when do you give major topics to newbies?"

"He's perfectly qualified." Surely whatever was written on that sheet of paper couldn't be _that_ absorbing.

"From _where_? I'd never even _heard_ his name before today and—"

"Surely you're not questioning my decisions as editor-in-chief." She looked up. "Not _you_."

Her tone was pleasant enough, but he could see a sharper edge reflected in her clear blue eyes, pinning him where he stood.

"…No, I'm not," Barnes said eventually. He hadn't gotten where he was by not knowing when to make a tactical retreat either.

"Then we don't have a problem," Elle said.

"Apparently not."

"Good." And, with a nod of her head, she ordered him out of her office.

-

See, Barnes hadn't always been one of the _New York Bulletin_ 's star journalists. He hadn't even always been on its investigative team.

He'd started out here as a reporter for the science and technology section—which, in a newspaper that counted Tony Stark amongst its main shareholders, was a fair deal larger than in most dailies.

He'd been enjoying it. It’d been the start of his career, and he hadn't been giving much thought to moving up or sideways just yet. But then he'd started working on a piece about the new military contracts Hammer Tech had scored in the wake of Stark Industries shutting down its weapon manufacturing branch, and something about the timeline had struck him as…odd.

Given the size of the order, one would've expected Hammer Tech to need some time to adjust. And yet the announced lead times hadn't been longer than usual. There hadn’t been any added delays due to the need to invest in new infrastructure or, if necessary, buy the factories Stark Industries had been willing to sell; to hire new engineer and workers; to procure raw materials in sufficient quantities—all measures that should've taken time, a lot of it. And yet hadn't. As if Hammer Tech had been able to anticipate, to prepare for that gigantic contract. As if they'd known in advance, well before any official decision or announcement, that they'd get the deal instead of their competitors.

There had been explanations for it, of course. Justin Hammer himself had stated that it was that preparedness, that ability to deliver within a standard timeframe that had led the military to favor Hammer Tech; that mass investments had been made _before_ the application campaign to ensure that they could realistically honor their promises—a huge risk for sure, if they hadn't obtained the contract, but a risk that had paid off.

Except, Barnes had thought, that no matter how dumb Hammer could be, he wasn't _that_ dumb. His _investors_ weren't that dumb. One didn't take that kind of risk, not when it came to such staggering sums of money, unless one knew for sure that it _would_ be rewarded.

So he'd done some more digging and, having found nothing to dispel his suspicions, had gone to Elle with them. It had been in the early days of her being editor-in-chief—quite a young one, and a woman to boot—when she'd still been in the process of asserting her authority. Given that Barnes hadn't exactly been a senior employee either, and that he'd been venturing outside of his usual field, she would've been well within her rights to hand the topic over to someone else, or to at least make him share the headline with someone more experienced, who would've had investigating down pat. That would've been the prudent thing to do.

Yet she hadn't. Barnes, his appetite whetted by that first taste of investigation, had asked to remain the leading reporter on the case, and she'd allowed it. She'd given him the time, the manpower, the right of initiative, the monopoly on decision making: everything he'd needed and more.

Her trust had been rewarded. _The New York Bulletin_ had been the one to break the story and, years down the line, both Hammer Tech and several high-ranking members of the military were still up to their necks in investigations and trials for unfair competition and corruption. But Elle couldn't have known that beforehand. In giving Barnes free reign, she'd taken a huge risk. Barnes had known to make good use of the opportunity offered to him, but he could just as well have botched the entire thing and put her position in jeopardy at a moment when it had been crucial for her to show that she could make the right choices as a manager.

So no, Barnes did not get to question her decisions.

He still had no intention to do so that evening when he sat down in front of his home computer. Obviously, she had reason to believe that Grant O'Connor belonged amongst the better members of her redaction team. A short internet search, and there was no doubt Barnes would find out why.

-

"A local newspaper—no, not even that, a _small-town newsletter_! That's the whole extent of his writing experience!"

"Uh oh," Becca said on the other end of the line.

"'Uh oh?'" Bucky repeated. "' _Uh oh_ '!? I don't think you fully grasp what that means, or you’d have a lot more to say than 'uh oh'!"

"Well. It's just, I thought we did not question Elle Richmond's decisions."

"Of course we don't."

"But?" Becca prompted.

"But it's a _newsletter_! From Bumfuck Nowhere, _Iowa_!"

"…Maybe it has very good articles? Have you read any?"

"No! Because that blasted rag doesn't even have a website! No online presence whatsoever, no internet archive, nada! That's how antiquated they are!"

"How tragic for you. Nothing for you to point and laugh at," Becca said wryly, because she knew her brother.

Bucky didn't dignify that with a direct answer, even though that was precisely what he'd been planning to do. "It's called _The Hawkguy_!" he exclaimed instead. "What the fuck is that even supposed to be, an ornithology review for farmers who're bored of counting cows?"

"I don't know, why don't you ask him?"

That stopped Bucky right in his tracks. "What?"

"Why don't you ask O'Malley or whatever his name is already—the new guy. Why don't you ask him?"

"What."

"No, I'm serious. It's not like it'd be difficult. Just take him out for a drink—like, say it's to welcome him onto the team or something, get a few beers in him, then ask him. About his experience, or whatever. Who knows, maybe he'll agree to send you his portfolio. If you ask nicely."

"'Ask nicely'," Bucky scoffed.

He could almost see Becca shrug. "It's worth a try," she said.

"Right."

-

Barnes didn't do any of that, of course. Instead he waited for O'Connor to be done with his piece with the full intention to point and laugh _then_.

It took a while. O'Connor didn't commit any rookie mistakes. He didn't rush things, researching his topic carefully, almost conscientiously, but didn't leave it too long either. He asked for advice from their more seasoned colleagues, all of whom seemed more than willing to welcome him into the fold, much to Barnes' indignation. He kept Elle up to date with his progress and followed her instructions if there were any. And he didn't neglect the other tasks assigned to him, signing off on a few smaller pieces. Barnes didn't bother with those to render his judgment: they were but minor contributions, done in collaboration with other people, and as such no proper pieces of evidence.

Once the St Ann Clinic piece was out though—once it had been approved and printed and distributed and therefore couldn't be taken back or erased _ever_ —he settled down for what he expected would be a very nice evening of vindication and schadenfreude. He comfortably ensconced himself in a corner of his couch with the paper version of the _Bulletin_ in his lap and, armed with a glass of red wine and an even redder pen, got ready to scoff and _annotate_.

Except that he didn't. He _couldn't._ Because, as it turned out, O'Connor had written _one hell of a piece_. The reporting was meticulous in its precision without becoming boring. It quietly led the reader through the succession of events, from cause to consequence, pointing out all the possible implications without interrupting the flow of the narrative, all of it coalescing into a vibrant plea in favor of vaccination without once coming off as preaching, or even partisan. It simply laid out the facts. But it did so while rooted in the visceral depths of human experience, as shown by O'Connor's choice to start his article with a description of symptoms: what it felt like for a child who'd contracted measles to develop the disease.

Barnes didn't know how he'd done it. How, in his exchanges with the children and families who'd suffered the consequences of the clinic's failings, he'd collected testimonies precise enough, articulate enough, to turn them into _this_ : a merciless yet sorrowful and most of all _painful_ rendition of what read like a descent into hell, imbued with the rawness of personal experience.

There wasn't much Barnes could find to criticize about that. And yes, it shouldn't have come as a surprise, given that the text had had to go through Elle in order to land into those pages, and that one did not question Elle Richmond's decisions. Yet it did. It _was_ a surprise, a disappointment, a rebuke.

It was _infuriating_.

-

Barnes wasn't very well disposed towards anyone the following morning, and even less towards O'Connor—which was probably why the man chose that very day to walk up to Barnes' desk and… _hover_.

" _What_?" Barnes snapped after ten seconds of O'Connor standing there like an ominous lamppost, if lampposts could ooze awkwardness instead of light.

"I really liked your article about Stark's Arc Reactor technology," the man said.

Barnes didn't know what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't that. "…Okay?" he said slowly. O'Connor showed no sign of moving, watching him expectantly, so he added, "Thanks?"

That was a mistake. Somehow O'Connor interpreted the acknowledgment as an _invitation_ : he plopped down into the chair tucked against Barnes' desk, the one where Barnes' sources usually sat, like—like he had a _right_ , like they were going to have a nice chat right here and now in the middle of the day, in the middle of the office, where all of Barnes' colleagues and his boss could hear and see.

"You did a great job explaining the concept of it," O'Connor said, "how it works and why it's so revolutionary, what are the challenges of the miniaturization process and what obstacles still stand in the way of mass production."

Barnes just _stared_ at him—at his dumb square, thick-framed glasses, at his disaster of a haircut, at his even bigger disaster of a checkered shirt that didn't even _fit_ , both too narrow at the shoulders and too large around the waist. He stared at the open expression on his ridiculous face, like O'Connor thought he was being nice instead of _downright_ _condescending_.

"I know," Barnes said, because he had _written the damn thing_.

"It was very easy to follow," O'Connor went on, "even for people who aren't well-versed in new technology."

Barnes carefully put down the pen he'd been holding lest he break it in half out of sheer _rage_. Surely a man who could write about human experience in a way that felt so immediate, so _real_ , couldn't be _that_ oblivious. "Yeah, that's kind of the point."

He was quite proud of how smoothly his voice came out, like nothing was wrong. Anyone who really knew him wouldn't have been fooled, though. Henricks certainly wasn't. Barnes could see him out of the corner of his eye, head carefully bent over his work, pretending that he was entirely absorbed and not hearing any of this.

O'Connor was undeterred. "Urich told me that's something you do, drop by the science and technology section from time to time. He told me that's where you started out when you first came here."

Barnes made a mental note to tell Urich that he was now dead to him.

"How did you switch to investigative pieces?" O'Connor asked.

"By working," Barnes replied. He even threw in a smile. "Something I'd really like to get back to now actually. If you don't mind."

O'Connor's expression froze in a very satisfying way. "Oh, um," he fumbled, "sure," and _finally_ made his exit.

Barnes tried not to look too ferocious as he watched him go, all the way back to his own desk, tucked in a corner of the room. The attempt wasn't very successful. When he turned back around, he locked eyes with Henricks, who'd looked up from his desk, and the expression on his face…

"What?" Barnes asked, and scowled. But all Henricks did was shake his head and return to his work without a word.

-

Fortunately, O'Connor didn't make another attempt to explain to Barnes how and why he was doing a good job. What's more, he didn't try to come and talk to Barnes again while Barnes was at his desk working. Clearly, he'd learned his lesson. Barnes encouraged it by making sure to always be seen at his desk working whenever he was in the office.

Not that it changed his pattern of behavior much. He always had a lot on his plate, he couldn't _dawdle_. The only breaks he took led him to the bathroom or the break room for a fresh cup of coffee. Neither lasted longer than the two minutes required to get there, do one's business, and return. Chit-chat was only tolerated as an exception, not a rule. As for lunch—provided he remembered it—he always had it outside, even in winter. Sometimes he took a colleague with him, usually Henricks or Urich, more rarely Anderson or Mendez. Less so these days, lest _someone else_ be invited to join.

The thing was, O'Connor was integrating very well with the team. People seemed to genuinely like him, and not just those who might've been after his ridiculous physique, which even his worst outfits couldn't completely conceal. No, people liked him as a person, and as a colleague—even those whose judgment Barnes acknowledged and respected the most. As if it hadn't occurred to any of them to do a little bit of digging and find out that the man was scarcely more than a fraud; or rather, as if it hadn't occurred to any of them to question Elle's hiring and managing decisions.

But why would it? O'Connor worked hard, and he worked well, both on his own and within a team. He knew when to make his own choices and when to listen to other opinions. The contents of his resume might be meager, but he definitely knew how to identify the information he needed, how to look for it, how to obtain it, how to double-check it. And he sure as hell knew how to craft a sentence, soon proving that the St Ann Clinic piece hadn't been a fluke.

There was, Barnes had to admit, a peculiar quality to his writing. Something like an echo, a resonance of times past, back when newspapers had been countless and influential and huge. Something Barnes might've almost been envious of, if envy wasn't an emotion he refused to ever feel. Something that, if it had already been in the articles that made up O'Connor's portfolio, perfectly explained why Elle had snatched him up at once when he'd applied.

So maybe, Barnes admitted to himself after a while—privately, with no intention of sharing that development with anyone—just maybe, he could, or even _should_ , try and give O'Connor the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe.

-

Barnes was still on his way towards that tentative resolution when he dropped by the office that Thursday evening after a meeting with one of his informants. It was so far into the night that it was almost morning, but he wanted to compare what he'd just been told with the data he'd already gathered while everything was still fresh in his mind. It wouldn't be the first all-nighter he'd ever pulled for a story.

The night guard was entirely unsurprised to see him and let him in easily enough. Beyond his station everything was dark, downstairs and in the main office. Even Elle's lights were off. She might be dedicated to her job, but right now even she was at home, with her husband, who was nice and proud and supportive of her successful career, but not so nice and proud and supportive that he’d appreciate her spending nights at work. Barnes, whose closest thing to a significant other was his cat Alpine, didn't have the same restrictions and so could stay at his desk for as long as he liked. He could work for hours like that, surrounded by the vast emptiness of the office space, cavernous in its silence and darkness.

Or it was, usually. This time, Barnes' attention was caught two steps from the elevator by the beam of light spilling from the break room, accompanied by voices. Someone was there. Two people, he wagered as he got closer. One of them was O'Connor, his baritone easily recognizable. The other voice, quick and nervous, struck Barnes as familiar, although he couldn't put his finger on where he'd heard it before.

"This is actually good stuff, Cap," it was saying.

"You sound surprised," O'Connor replied over the sound of coffee being poured. "If I remember well, I was the one telling you cartoon drawing wasn't the same as writing, and you calling bullshit."

"What? Who cares about that? What I mean is, you don't have to try so hard."

"Tony," O'Connor said, almost reproachfully, and that's when Barnes connected the dots: the second voice was that of Tony Stark, who had been known to drop by the office to check on things from time to time, whenever it struck his fancy. And with whom O'Connor was on a first name basis, apparently. "You know I'm grateful to you for helping me get the job—but that's exactly what it is: a job. I've _got_ to take it seriously. If I don't, then there’s no point to it, don't you see?"

"You know I don't. If I were you, I'd be off somewhere enjoying my retirement. On a beach in the tropics, drinking piña coladas all day, every day. Have you ever had a piña colada, Cap?"

"You know I haven't," O'Connor replied, laughter in his voice.

They probably kept at it, laughing and talking about exotic cocktails and how they were a much better option than what some people had centered their whole life around, but if they did, Barnes certainly didn't hear it. He didn’t stay. Instead he turned right around and left, before the meaning of what he'd heard could fully settle—before he could react to it and do or say something in front of one of their main investors that he might eventually regret.

-

"Nepotism! Or whatever the fuck it's supposed to be called when you're not even fucking related!"

"…Hello, dear brother, good morning to you too," Becca said after a pause, in that dangerously sweet voice of hers. "What's this about again?"

"O'Connor! _That_ 's how he got the job! I knew there was something fishy, but that's just pure favoritism—"

"Bucky—"

"—unless, hey, maybe it was a good old couch promotion, with Stark's proclivities it wouldn't be _that_ surprising—"

" _Bucky_." Becca's tone finally registered. Bucky stopped talking. "Okay," she added once she was sure that she had his attention. "First of all. You're so lucky that I'm on a work trip in Brussels right now and that you did not _actually_ call me at—what time is it even in New York right now, two a.m.? Three?"

"Um," Bucky said, suddenly aware of where and most of all when he was: walking—stalking—down the street in the dead of the night. He hadn't even _thought_ before he'd dialed Becca's number. Which she knew, obviously. And if his call had woken her up at such an ungodly hour…

Yes, he was very lucky indeed.

"Secondly," Becca went on before he could come up with a clumsy excuse, "about O'Connor. What do you care?"

Bucky screeched to a halt. "What do I care? _What do I fucking care_? I care about that fucking asshole just waltzing in like he owns the place while people who actually _deserve_ the position stay stuck at the door! I care that the only thing he has to thank for this job is the whim of some dick from up high and not his own merit or—or _years_ , fucking _years_ of hard work and sweat and fucking _tears_ —"

"Oh yeah, I can definitely feel your tears right now," Becca interrupted, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Oh, _fuck_ you, Becks," Bucky snapped.

"Well, fuck you right back, Buck," she retorted at once, because she wasn't in the business of taking any of his shit without dishing it right back. After a pointed pause, she went on, "Look, I get why you're pissed. But there's nothing you can do about it. Dude's here now—"

"Undeservedly!" Bucky butted in, although he felt a twinge of unease. Because he _should_ _'ve_ been able to do something about it. He should've been able to go to Elle with what he'd heard—except that Elle had said, _He's perfectly qualified_. She had to know about Stark, and about what Bucky had found after a fifteen-minute internet search; and still she'd defended O'Connor. So either she didn't care, or she'd been _persuaded_ not to care. Whatever it was, Bucky didn't like it. He didn't want to believe that of her: that she could be indifferent or swayed by outside pressure, not without a peep of protest, not when it came to what was best for the _Bulletin_.

"Well, he is," Becca was saying, "and _now_ he's earning his keep by doing a more than decent job—even you admitted it. So he won't drag the paper down, he won't even drag _you_ down if you ever have to work with him on a story. So it's not your problem." She hesitated for a second. "Unless you're worried he might threaten your position as the paper's rising star, that is."

"Oh, in his _dreams_." Since the clinic scandal, no topic had popped up that Bucky would've been ready to fight others over, but if that ever happened and O'Connor was the contender, he would have to pry the story out of Bucky's cold dead hands.

"That's what I thought," Becca said. "Besides, even if he did start to become a threat, you know you can change gears and leave him in the dust any time. Didn't you say there was a huge story you were working on, one that'd earn you a Pulitzer for sure once it was out?"

"Yeah," Bucky said, "there is."

-

The Story—complete with capital letters to distinguish it from other, lowly average stories—had started a little over a year ago, when extraterrestrials hell-bent on world domination had ripped a hole through the New York sky, only to be stopped by a team of superheroes who had more or less appeared out of nowhere.

The epic tale of their heroic rescue of planet Earth and its inhabitants was not The Story. That had already been covered again and again, from beginning to end, through all possible angles. No, The Story had to do with what had come _after_.

Of all six members of that semi-improvised team, Tony Stark—alias Iron Man—had been the only previously known operative. And it had stayed that way. Thor, by all accounts, had left Earth nearly at once with his captive brother, who'd been behind the invasion. Black Widow, Hawkeye, and the Hulk had vanished as quickly as they'd appeared, returning to whatever intelligence agency or military lab they'd sprung from. People had tried to go after them, of course; but none of them had succeeded—even Barnes, who by now could easily recognize the doors of state and military secrecy when they warningly slammed shut in his face.

Nomad, though—the sixth member of the team. Nomad hadn't disappeared.

He'd made quite the impression, both during the battle and after. It hadn't just been because of his costume, unquestionably the most garish and impractical of the whole team—which was saying something, given that said team had included a red and gold flying suit of armor and a freaking cape. No, it had been because, as the footage and testimonies had started rolling in, it had become obvious that he'd been the one behind the strategy that had kept the invasion contained to the island of Manhattan, that had taken all civilians off the streets, saving countless of lives, and that had eventually led the team to victory. It had been because in the aftermath he'd stuck around, helping with search and rescue, with risk evaluation and damage assessment, with morale even. It was because he'd never _stopped_ helping. He'd been popping up all over the city ever since, lending a hand, preventing accidents, interrupting break-ins, putting a stop to assault and harassment: New York's latest vigilante.

That made him different from all the other so-called Avengers, even Stark. Whoever had organized the formation and deployment of the team, whoever kept Black Widow, Hawkeye, and the Hulk under their thumb didn't have the same hold over him. Or if they did, they gave him one hell of a long leash. That wasn't likely, Barnes wagered, for reasons of liability if nothing else. It made more sense for Nomad to be independent. Which made him fair game to investigate, but also accessible, vulnerable—unmaskable.

 _That_ was The Story. Or it _would_ be The Story, once Barnes was done with it. Then he'd tell his fellow citizens everything they wanted to know about who the man was, where he came from, what his motivations were, what had given him his abilities—because there was no doubt that Nomad was enhanced, not after everyone had seen him lift tons of concrete like it was nothing after the Battle of New York, not after he'd taken bullets and blows that would've _killed_ anyone else and walked away fine. There were _piles_ of secrets right there, and _Barnes_ would be the one to uncover them.

He was a long way from done, though; and only progressing in very small increments.

One slight issue was that it wasn't a topic he'd been officially assigned, complete with Elle's seal of approval. What little he'd garnered up until now was still too flimsy. It lacked the substance required for her to green-light a pitch about it in a meeting. So for now, it was mostly a topic he'd assigned to himself, to work on in his free time, whenever he had an evening or a weekend free. Which, given his disaster of a social and love life, was quite often, no matter how frequently he stayed late at the office.

His sister would've said that it wasn't a good thing—like she could talk, invested as she was in her job at the State Department. Barnes would simply retort that it wasn't his fault. That was just how things were. Much like the chicken and the egg, his insane work schedule and utter lack of friends and/or lovers were both cause and consequence of each other, with no way to know which one had come first and started the circle. His sister would blame work, especially since he'd cancelled the last three dates she'd set up for him at the last minute to go check out a lead before it had turned cold—when he hadn't plain forgotten about it in the rush to meet a deadline. But, Barnes would counter, he wouldn't have developed such habits if he'd ever been a social butterfly, if he hadn't had an absurd amount of time on his hands that he'd had to fill _somehow_. Work was as good a way to do that as any.

Besides, his chase after Nomad wasn't very demanding. There were only two angles to approach it from right now: the streets and the internet. The former meant nothing more than wandering around the city, checking the scene of previous sightings, looking for witnesses and people who might know something and be willing to talk, trying to end up at the right place at the right time. Due to Barnes' full-time day-job and to the fact that Nomad was statistically more active during dark hours, most of that roaming took place at night. Not that Becca knew that. She would've freaked if she had, because no matter how many years of krav maga Barnes had under his belt, she still saw him as nothing more than her wee little brother. So it was better that she never realized that Barnes wouldn't exactly _mind_ a mugging, not if it came with Nomad dropping down from the sky to stop it from happening and Barnes finally catching him.

Not that anything like that had happened yet. Barnes hadn't been assaulted even _once,_ much to his dismay. Nomad remained frustratingly elusive. And either no one on the streets knew anything, or no one would talk, which left Barnes with nothing to show for his efforts aside from an even greater sleep deficit than usual.

Whenever his lack of success with that venture became too much to bear, he turned to his second line of investigation: online content. A plethora of forums, communities, reddit or twitter threads, Tumblr accounts, and blogs had sprung up in the wake of Nomad's arrival, which generated all kinds of useful materials: extra footage, witness accounts, in-depth analyses of Nomad's equipment and fighting style… Along with it, however, came an even greater amount of pure drivel: paranoid speculations, fictional stories, photo manipulations, and unrealistic art, all of which made extracting valid information exceedingly difficult. Barnes had lost count of how many times he'd immersed himself into a witness account only to realize half-way through that it wasn't genuine testimony but pure fiction, a fantasy of rescue—which usually became obvious when Nomad ended up hurt and in need of 'tender loving care', or when the words 'crotch zipper' made an appearance, because God forbid superheroes had flies like everyone else.

Similarly, Barnes had read enough commentary to last him a lifetime about Nomad's costume, which had eventually changed to something more practical than what he'd sported during the Battle of New York: a suit without cape _or_ disturbingly deep V-neck, cut for ease of movement in a fabric that at least _looked_ like it could sustain a fight, its color muted so that he didn't stand out like a neon light anymore. Opinions differed on the matter. Some people actually regretted the 'original look'. This led to endless debates over the merits of each suit, both in terms of tactic—which Barnes appreciated—and aesthetics—which he appreciated less.

He was pretty sure he'd developed some sort of visual allergy to the word 'glutes'.

But he was determined. Somewhere under all the conspiracy theories—according to which Nomad was but the forerunner of yet another alien invasion by ways of the deep state—the anatomically inaccurate renditions of Nomad's back muscles, and the speculations about the size of his dick, there was precious information to be found. And find it Barnes would. After all, he was a professional at unearthing that one precious gem out of a pile of garbage—sometimes literally. He would extract what clues subsisted in all this, about Nomad's character and abilities and habits. He would manage to draw a precise map of all his appearances. He would identify his patterns of behavior in both time and space.

In the end, he _would_ get him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments welcome! :)


	2. Chapter 2

The fact that Barnes had a personal project by no means implied that he neglected his duties at work. Articles didn't write themselves, after all, and Barnes was nothing if not a dedicated employee.

Or he was, until his boss decided to test his loyalty by agreeing that he should investigate the topic he'd just pitched, only to add, "Take O'Connor with you," right afterwards. And moving on like nothing was wrong, giving Barnes no time to protest.

He _wanted_ to protest, though. Despite himself, he glanced at O'Connor, who sent him a brief smile that was probably supposed to be friendly and _this couldn't be happening_. Sure, the topic had the potential to become big, so he wasn't surprised that he'd been partnered with a colleague. But _O'Connor_?

He would rather have anyone else. Even Castillo. Even _Ellison_.

Elle wouldn't allow it, though. She'd spoken, and what she said went. As it always did. As it had when she'd agreed to hire O'Connor in the first place.

The meeting went on and Barnes watched her, with her straight blond hair falling tidily around her shoulders, her thin mouth pursed in a mixture of concentration and faint skepticism while she listened to Mendez, and he felt a small, hot spark of resentment. That she'd not only allowed O'Connor into their midst, but that she also insisted on inflicting him upon the rest of them…

He was tempted, suddenly. To follow her into her office once the meeting was over and to tell her that he knew. About O'Connor, about his so-called credentials, about Stark. To let her know exactly what he thought of her 'decisions as editor-in-chief'. To threaten to let _everyone_ know, unless she promised to never _ever_ partner him with O'Connor. He was, very briefly, very tempted.

But.

It would turn ugly. No matter what O'Connor's arrival seemed to imply, Elle was very much not one to submit to blackmail. She _would_ fight back, in ways that would be extremely painful to them both, but to him most of all. That much he knew, and knew keenly enough to hesitate.

The meeting drew to a close. Elle stood up to leave the room, and Barnes remained seated, weighing his options—but even that was enough to let any chance he might've had to speak up pass him by. What's more, Urich had noticed his quiet. As everyone else filed out of the room, he walked over and sat down in the chair beside Barnes', gesturing at O'Connor to give them a minute. The man had been lingering, probably to start discussing their new topic. He didn't protest, though. Urich and Barnes watched him go.

"He's a good worker," Urich said once the door had closed, "and a good team player."

"So everyone keeps saying," Barnes said sullenly.

"Yeah. So don't you go and dismiss him outright. There is a reason he made it here. He knows his stuff."

 _The only 'stuff' he knows is how to suck Iron Man's metal dick_ , Barnes wanted to say, _almost_ said, but didn't. Urich was only trying to help, and he certainly didn't deserve Barnes blowing up in his face.

Besides, of all his colleagues, he was the one whose opinion Barnes valued the most. Urich wasn't stupid. He wasn't naive or inexperienced. Barnes had learned a lot from him over the years, and he knew that there was more to be learned still. If Urich said that O'Connor was good, then O'Connor _was_ good, because Urich didn't say that kind of thing unless he had solid grounds to do so.

The realization settled in Barnes' mind, closely followed by a flush of something like shame. Suddenly he was acutely aware of what this was, of what it implied: that the depth of his aversion had been so obvious that his colleagues had taken notice. Worse, that the one colleague he actually looked up to had felt the need to intervene. Like Barnes couldn't control himself. Like he was nothing but a capricious child: something to be managed.

"You'll give him a chance," Urich said, "won't you?"

It wasn't quite a question. Barnes bit back a sigh. "I'll try."

-

Bucky might've held himself back in front of Urich, but he didn't have the same qualms with his sister. Therefore, Becca got to hear all his complaints, presented in the most graphic words over the phone while he grabbed a quick lunch. She was made of tougher stuff than Urich, in some ways. Besides, Bucky wasn't trying to impress _her_. She already knew all of his worst traits and loved him despite all of them.

Not that she let him get away with anything as a consequence, far from it.

"Careful, Buck," was her reaction, "or I'll start believing you're jealous." She paused. "Although jealous of whom, and for what exactly, I'm not quite sure."

Bucky scowled. "What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"

"You're so smart, you figure it out," she said. "But it won't change the fact that it's a pitiful emotion. You're better than that. So put on your big boy pants already, and let it _go_."

-

Since Barnes wasn't an idiot, he took the advice handed to him and, upon his return to the office, made his way towards O'Connor's desk. That he dragged his feet while doing so had no relevance in the grand scheme of things.

One week later, he had to admit that Urich was right. O'Connor _was_ a good worker. He _was_ a good team player. He _did_ know his stuff.

One detail Urich had failed to mention, however, was that O'Connor was also a _complete asshole_.

Which was great, in its own way. Urich had almost made Barnes feel bad about the way he'd been behaving, and he probably would have succeeded if O'Connor had been anything like what Urich's intervention had implied he was: someone nice and meek, someone who was just _trying his best_ , someone who had to be shielded from Barnes' ire. But he wasn't, and so Barnes felt no compulsion about fighting right back.

See, for someone whose entire experience as a journalist could be summarized in one single line, O'Connor sure had a lot of opinions about the proper way to do things. What's more, he wasn't afraid to defend them, especially when they differed from Barnes'. He questioned _everything_ —every hypothesis, every plan, every conclusion—and he always made sure that Barnes knew it when his explanations weren't satisfactory or, more accurately, were about to be dismissed as complete bullshit.

But the worst was, he wasn't always wrong. Not all his ideas were completely stupid; not all his instincts completely off the mark. Sometimes he was even actually, irritatingly, quite brilliant. His confidence in his own abilities often chafed, but it wasn't excessive either: he knew when to admit that his own experience was lacking and that he should let Barnes take the lead.

Most of all, he could be convinced. He could be made to change his mind or to at least reserve his judgment, provided the arguments in favor of it were solid and coherent. Always having to justify everything was exhausting, but also stimulating—and incredibly satisfying when it _worked_. It was a constant challenge, one Barnes was more than happy to rise up to.

Unfortunately, the whole process took time, and did tend to degenerate in ways that could be heard beyond the walls of the work room they'd taken over for the duration of their collaboration. On one such occasion the door opened, cutting Barnes off right in the middle of a sentence.

"What's going on here?" Elle asked, eyebrows pointedly raised.

"Nothing more than Mr. Barnes and I having a healthy and lively discussion about where to take our research next, ma'am," O'Connor replied at once, looking like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

Elle threw him a skeptical look, before glancing at Barnes for confirmation. He tilted his head with a minute shrug. _What he said_.

She narrowed her eyes. "Then do try and make it less 'lively'," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," O'Connor said. Clearly, he'd already understood how things worked around here.

And they did. Try, that is. They weren't always successful.

Not that it was entirely a bad thing. By the end of their cooperation, both Barnes and O'Connor had had to justify so many of their choices and to explain so many of their conclusions to each other that their article had become one of the most solid pieces Barnes had ever turned in.

Elle noticed. She only sent it back once before it was approved.

-

Getting an article published after only one round of corrections was cause for celebration.

"Let's go for a drink," Barnes said at the end of that day. Success always mellowed him out some, and so now he thought that maybe his sister had been on to something all those weeks ago, when she'd suggested that strategy.

O'Connor looked surprised, then pleased. He agreed.

The first thing Barnes learned about his new colleague was that O'Connor was as much of an asshole out of the office as in. But at least, in a relaxed setting, he was some sort of a funny one. He had a dark, caustic humor that caught one all the more unawares because he sported a flawlessly straight face whenever he used it. More than once, Barnes found himself snorting into his glass without meaning to.

But there were other things, too. Things that corroborated an impression Barnes had felt on and off over the weeks they'd been working side by side. It wasn't anything big or even definite, just…minute details. Small clues. Discreet, but Barnes made a living out of noticing such things—all congregating to make O'Connor seem subtly out of place. And by that Barnes didn't mean out of place in the office. He meant in general.

Some of those signs were actually less obvious at work. O'Connor's choice of clothes, for instance. At the office it was easy enough to dismiss, given the summits of ill-fitting drabness some of their colleagues reached every day—the less said about Castillo's beige suit, the better. Among them, O'Connor blended right in. Less so now that he was out in the world. While Barnes, who'd turned business casual into an art form, only needed to slip off his tie and pop a couple buttons on his collar to go from 'dapper professional' to 'out on the town for a relaxing evening with friends', O'Connor remained stuck in that confusing blend of dull work attire, casual wear for the old and retired, and weekend clothes favored by the proud owner of a family van tempted by a mid-life crisis.

It wasn't just that. It was how he frowned at the cocktail menu, looking almost alarmed for a moment before putting it resolutely _away_ and settling for a cautiously conservative beer on tap. It was how he seemed to both keenly notice the background music and disapprove of it entirely. It was the strange quirks in his vocabulary and, yes, that accent Barnes' colleagues had mentioned when he'd first arrived, which became stronger whenever he was focused on something else, or tired at the end of a long day, and which was now returning with a vengeance.

It was how even now, in a completely casual setting, he still didn't take out his phone. He definitely owned one, Barnes had seen it once or twice when O'Connor had used it to make a call: a fancy model a few upgrades above Barnes' own. But apart from those few calls, it had stayed in O'Connor's pocket for the duration of their partnership. He never checked it, intentionally or distractedly. He never used it to look up his emails or to do a quick internet search—he used his desktop computer for that—or even to check the time—for that, he had a _goddamn watch_. It was like he'd never developed any of the habits that naturally came with the possession of such a device: the urge to make sure one hadn't missed anything, or simply the need to fiddle with it, to keep one's hands busy. It hinted either at a level of self-control Barnes had no hope to ever achieve, or at a deep-seated conviction that there was nothing to be missed. As if O'Connor never checked his texts because he didn't expect to receive any. As if there was no one in his life who might send him anything. Barnes might've scoffed at the thought, said, _Of course there isn't, given how much of an asshole the guy is_ , but he didn't: it was too disquieting.

And then there was the way O'Connor didn't get references, no matter how obvious or common they were.

It happened again right then, as Barnes was regaling him with a story about one of the most disastrous witnesses he'd ever had to deal with. Becca had told him once that office horror stories weren't actually a proper way to make friends, especially not when work was pretty much the only thing one talked about. But O'Connor was still listening and even had an amused smile on his lips, so really, what did Becca know.

"So after that he _finally_ said, 'Okay, I'll talk,' and I thought, 'Yes, _finally_ , we might actually be going somewhere at last'—except that when he started talking, what he said had _nothing to do with what I needed to hear_." He shook his head, still disgusted after all these years. "Seriously, I asked him about his neighbor's night habits and what he said pretty much amounted to, 'Do you know the muffin man?'"

He took a hefty swallow of his cocktail after that, to try and chase away the memory. He could still feel the exhaustion and bone-deep frustration that had plagued him at the time, if he let himself linger on it too much.

When he lowered his drink, O'Connor was watching him strangely.

"What?" Barnes asked.

"Nothing, I…didn't know you listened to Ella Fitzgerald, is all," O'Connor said.

Now it was Barnes' turn to be confused. "What? Who said anything about Ella Fitzgerald? I meant, it was like that scene in _Shrek_ when Lord Farquaad—"

"Oh," O'Connor said—except that it wasn't an 'Oh' as in 'Oh, _right_ '. Rather, it sounded puzzled again, almost…disappointed?

Barnes put down his drink. "Seriously?" he asked. "Lord Farquaad? _Shrek_? Don't tell me you haven't seen _Shrek_ , they do re-runs of it all the time on TV."

O'Connor had tensed. "There weren't many TVs where I grew up," he said. Like he didn't know that he wouldn't have needed any TV to see it, back when it had first come out in theaters. Like he had no idea when that had happened, how old—or, in this case, recent—the movie was.

Barnes watched him for a bit, then pushed his glass away to fold his arms onto the table. "Okay, so," he said, "feel free to tell me to fuck off if I'm way off base or if this is too personal or something but—" He lowered his voice. "—were you raised Amish or something?"

Because that would explain a lot.

The corner of O'Connor's mouth twitched up. "Or something."

"Uh," Barnes said. "What was _that_ like?"

And just like that, O'Connor stiffened again. "I'd rather not talk about it, if it's all the same to you."

Barnes nodded—as far as 'fuck off's went, this one was actually pretty polite—and said, "Got it. How about I get us another round instead?"

He barely waited for an answer before he went, because his purpose was as much to keep the alcohol flowing as to give O'Connor some space. He came back with a strong beer for O'Connor, a fresh cocktail for himself, and two shots.

"So," he said, once they'd downed the latter, "what do you enjoy best about the 21st century, now that you're here?"

"Modern medicine," O'Connor replied at once, like he didn't even have to think about it. Barnes was surprised. Not by the words, but by his own reaction to them, because suddenly he realized that he'd been expecting—hoping for?—O'Connor to say something like ‘gay marriage’. But he hadn't.

Barnes pushed down what definitely wasn't faint disappointment in favor of looking O'Connor up and down. "Doesn't look like you've suffered too much from the lack of it, though," he said.

"Yeah, it doesn't look like it now, does it?" O'Connor replied. His forced smile was back.

It suddenly occurred to Barnes that there was probably a connection between this and O'Connor's stout defense of vaccination in the St. Ann Clinic piece. That parts of it _had_ been rooted in personal experience. And that just like that, he'd put his foot right into the topic O'Connor had just explicitly told him he didn't want to talk about.

He changed tracks. "I bet people just _love_ to give you lists of things you absolutely have to see or read or whatever," he said.

O'Connor huffed as he relaxed. "You got no idea."

-

Apart from those few slip-ups, the evening turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. So much so that Barnes, who would freely admit that he was out of practice with such things, failed to properly monitor his alcohol intake and ended up a bit more smashed than he'd planned or expected.

"Come on, let's get you home," O'Connor said. Apparently, he was the type to turn into a gentleman at the stroke of midnight.

"How are you still upright?" Barnes mumbled. O'Connor had matched him drink for drink, yet he didn't even seem tipsy. The ground had turned liquid under their feet, making Barnes trip while the buildings around them tilted alarmingly, but O'Connor didn't appear to notice. He was steadily supporting Barnes—carrying him, more like—down the street, like a ship captain entirely indifferent to the rolling of the deck, no matter how strong.

"I got a hollow leg," O'Connor said, doing nothing to contradict the analogy.

Barnes grunted. "Doesn't feel hollow to me," he retorted, before realizing—belatedly—that he was groping the inseam of his very male colleague, who might or might not have been raised to believe that gay people belonged in hell. An almost sobering dash of fright coursed through him. But O'Connor didn't dump him in the gutter, so either he hadn't noticed or, more likely, he'd decided to put it down to Barnes' drunkenness and not mind.

Still, Barnes resolved to try and keep his hands to himself from then on.

It wasn't easy. Not because he suddenly found O'Connor profoundly alluring, but because of the conflicting messages sent by the fact that, with Barnes draped all over him, the man not only followed him all the way up to his apartment and into his bedroom, but also helped him divest himself of his shoes and clothes until he was down to nothing but his boxer briefs. It was lucky that Barnes was too drunk for his dick to visibly perk up—not that it would have done so for long, given that the next thing O'Connor did was force him into a t-shirt, make him brush his teeth, and drink an entire glass of water, in a way that was eerily reminiscent of Barnes' own Ma that time she'd caught him sneaking home way past curfew.

Barnes' mind cleared a little after that, so when O'Connor tried to make him lie down, he resisted and said, "No, wait. Alpine."

O'Connor paused—and the thing was, the way he stood, stopped in the movement of helping Barnes into bed, his arms bracing him, suddenly meant that he was supporting most of Barnes' weight. And he did so like it was easy, like it was no effort at all, even though despite his lean figure Barnes still clocked at a tight 160 lb. "Alpine?" O'Connor asked, hushed.

Barnes swallowed. "Cat," he managed to say. "Food."

An angry meow rang out right then, backing his claim. He looked down and there Alpine was, standing beside the bed, staring at him accusingly.

"Oh," O'Connor said, stepping back and leaving Barnes strangely bereft. "It's okay, I can feed it. What's it getting, giblets?"

Now _that_ was a sobering thought. "What? No, _ew._ Wet food, that's what he eats. It's in the kitchen, left cupboard."

So O'Connor went, leaving Barnes half-sitting, half-lying on the bed. As soon as he was gone, Alpine jumped onto the covers to better glare—until he heard the distinctive sound of a cupboard, followed by that of a drawer and can opener. Then he was off like a shot to answer that siren's call.

"Traitor," Barnes mumbled, but took advantage of the cat's departure to start the process of getting under the covers—for a process it was, and an embarrassingly laborious one at that, given his current state. He still wasn't quite done by the time O'Connor returned, a second glass of water in hand.

"Quite a wall you got back there," he said with a smirk.

It took Barnes a second to understand what he meant: the two large cork boards surrounding his desk where he'd displayed all the materials he'd managed to dig up on Nomad. "Fuck off," he grumbled, vainly tugging at the sheet that just _would not come_. Then he paused. Looked up. Pointed. "Don't steal my story."

O'Connor just laughed, the asshole, and came closer. "Don't worry, I got no love for capes or plunging V-necks. Here, drink this too." He handed over the glass and, while Barnes drank it, unstuck the covers from underneath his legs.

"Thanks," Barnes said grudgingly.

"Don't mention it," O'Connor replied, taking back the now empty glass. He held the covers up and waited for Barnes to lie down before tucking him in like a solicitous grandmother. "Just go to sleep."

Barnes did.

-

He dreamed, and in his dream he was falling, or he thought he was, but then arms came around him like O'Connor's had and stopped him.

"Are you alright?" Nomad asked, and Barnes said, "Yes," feeling strangely breathless.

Nomad smiled. "Let's get you home," he said, and carried Barnes down the street and up the stairs of his building and into his apartment, all the way to his bed.

"Thank you," Barnes said, resting a hand on Nomad's arm, which was tense from holding him but nowhere near tiring.

"Just doing my job," Nomad replied, like he always did.

"What can I do to show you my gratitude?"

"Knowing that you’re safe is all I need," Nomad said, again like he always did—but his eyes darted down to Barnes' lips.

Barnes smiled and slid a hand up behind Nomad's head to pull him down for a kiss. Certainly the hero would've been strong enough to resist, if he'd wanted to. But he didn't. Instead he yielded beautifully, his lips parting almost at once. They kissed. Quickly, it grew more heated, Nomad pressing Barnes down onto the mattress. His hands were everywhere, opening and untucking Barnes' shirt to slide in underneath, and Barnes wanted to touch him right back, but he could find no purchase against Nomad’s suit, no seam, no button to undo. He growled in frustration, but then Nomad took his hand and guided it downwards—and would you look at that, people were right, there _was_ a crotch zipper, skillfully hidden behind a fold of the fabric, and now Nomad had shown him where it was, so Barnes carefully eased it open and Nomad's cock sprang free, long and thick and heavy in Barnes' palm, fully erect, and—

And Barnes woke up, suddenly, or nearly so, turning over in his bed. He was still most of the way asleep, still slightly drunk, his cock a hot and urgent weight between his legs. He didn't even think before reaching into his underwear and bringing himself right off, his mind coasting on the blurred impressions flowing through his mind, of Nomad bearing down on him, of Nomad’s cock rubbing against him or, better, sliding into him and _stretching_ him.

It didn't take long. He fell back asleep right afterwards too, so that the following morning he woke up both with a hangover and covered in dried semen: a great way to start the day. He staggered out of bed and into the bathroom, almost tripping over Alpine who was already clamoring for more food, the ravenous devil.

The dream came back to him while he was scrubbing himself thoroughly under the spray. Along with it came a flash of mortification, now that he was awake and able to see it for what it really was. Clearly, having to sift through countless fake accounts of nightly encounters with Nomad in his search for rare accurate renditions of the truth was having disturbing effects on his subconscious. On the heels of that realization came another one, a memory: O'Connor coming back from the kitchen and saying, _Quite a wall you got back there_. Which meant that he knew. That he'd _seen_. Barnes' humiliation was complete.

Except that O'Connor hadn't mocked him for it, beyond that brief remark and smirk. He'd taken care of Barnes, getting him home in one piece and making sure that he was comfortable and properly hydrated, so that his hangover was nowhere near as bad as it could've been.

…He was just waiting for Barnes to be completely sober so that he'd really _feel_ the ridicule, wasn't he?

Barnes made his way to work feeling both peeved and wary as a consequence, two feelings that only deepened when he found O'Connor waiting for him in front of the office looking fresh as a daisy, like he'd spent his evening at home eating a perfectly balanced dinner and reading a book on US history before going to bed at a reasonable hour. Barnes' headache and faint nausea were nothing that he couldn't pretend away or at least work through, but it still chafed.

 _How_ , he wanted to ask, but didn't.

"I wanted to say thank you for last night," O'Connor said, holding out one of the two coffee cups he'd been carrying, and that Barnes only noticed now.

Barnes took it, because one never turned down free coffee. "I feel like _I_ should be the one thanking _you_ ," he mumbled as they stepped through the doors and made their way to the elevator. Or maybe not: one mouthful, and it turned out that the coffee O'Connor had gotten him was _utterly vile_. He stared down at it, betrayed.

O'Connor didn't notice. "It was fun," he said, smiling. The elevator arrived with a ping and they stepped inside. "We should do it again some time."

Preoccupied as Barnes was by his disgusting coffee, it took him a second to notice: O'Connor sounded nervous. Which confused Barnes, until he remembered where he and O'Connor had stood, before their forced cooperation had yielded an article that had prompted Elle to say, _Good job, you two_.

Then he realized that O'Connor had made no mention of what he'd seen the previous night in the corner of Barnes' living-room. So Barnes said, "Sure."

Becca was going to be so proud.

-

By the time lunch rolled around, Barnes was actually toying with the idea of inviting O'Connor along with him and maybe Urich. The thought never came to fruition, though, because before it could even develop into a decision, a woman came in. A woman so stunning that several of Barnes' colleagues simply stopped whatever they'd been doing and… _stared_ as she walked past. Large piercing eyes, perfectly coiffed bright red hair, features both fine and sharp, with a body and outfit to match. Her dress was obviously bespoke, made to subtly enhance her curves without becoming vulgar. In one word, she was beautiful; the kind of beauty one would’ve expected to be nothing but a lie if seen on a poster or in a magazine, the result of base manipulation and artifice. Yet there she was, right in front of them, almost otherworldly.

Barnes firmly identified as a gay man but even he couldn't be entirely sure that, were she to proposition him, he wouldn't be at least briefly tempted to say yes.

She didn't spare him a glance, though. Actually, she ignored pretty much everyone and everything around her, walking in a perfectly straight line on perfectly balanced heels all the way up to…O'Connor's desk. O'Connor, engrossed as he was in some report or other, hadn't noticed a thing. He only looked up once she stopped, two feet away from him.

At this point, Barnes was pretty sure he wasn't the only one holding his breath.

He didn't know what he was expecting. O'Connor tripping right over himself, maybe. Whatever it was, it definitely didn't include O'Connor's face blooming into a wide, warm smile. He stood up, then leaned down to let the woman drop a kiss on his cheek: a brief yet smooth ballet, rife with affection and familiarity. They exchanged a few words that Barnes was too far away to hear, then O'Connor grabbed his jacket and checked his pockets. Just like that, they were ready to leave. The woman settled herself snugly at O'Connor's side, her hands tucked in the crook of his elbow, her face turned up towards him like a flower towards the sun, and they were off.

Everyone stared at them as they crossed the office to the elevator. O'Connor and his companion didn't notice. The elevator came, its doors opened. They went in. The doors closed again behind them, leaving nothing but stunned silence in their wake.

"Well," Lawson said, " _fuck_."

She was speaking for all of them.

-

Lawson did more than say what they were all thinking. In the hours and days that followed, she made sure to find out everything she could about O'Connor's presumed girlfriend, from O'Connor himself and from other, sometimes less legal channels. Since she had no qualms about sharing the results of her research, the entire office soon knew all about it, Barnes included.

Thus, they learned that the woman's name was Natalie Rushman and that, against all expectations, she was not a model—although she _had_ done some modeling in her early 20s to pay for her law studies. Now she worked as a personal assistant to none other than Tony Stark, having been hired to replace Pepper Potts when the latter had taken over as CEO of Stark Industries.

Now, Barnes was aware that he could be judgmental at times. But he was pretty sure that _anyone_ would agree that a woman who'd gone to law school and looked like Ms. Rushman did, yet settled not only for a job as Tony Stark's glorified babysitter but also for the likes of _Grant O'Connor_ had to have some serious, deep-seated issues. Sure, she probably got compensation for the pains of her job in form of an obscenely large paycheck, a fair amount of paid holidays, and a solid health insurance plan that'd give her access to therapy were she to ever need it. But when it came to O'Connor… The man's personality couldn't possibly be winning him any points—and Barnes refused to consider in any sort of detail the other, more likely explanation for Ms. Rushman's choice.

One thing the whole matter did solve was the mystery of how O'Connor had come into contact with Tony Stark and convinced the man to use his influence to get him his job at the _Bulletin_. After all, there was no doubt that Stark owed his assistant a number of huge favors.

What it didn't explain was how O'Connor and Ms. Rushman had met and become an item. All O'Connor had said when Lawson had asked had been a vague, ‘She helped me a lot when I first got here’, with no way for Lawson to know whether he meant 'here' as in ' _The Bulletin',_ or 'here' as in 'New York City'. Barnes, who was a bit better informed, suspected that O'Connor was actually referring to his leaving the Amish boondocks for modern civilization. Not that it brought him any closer to figuring out what had happened.

But maybe it hadn't been anything convoluted. A chance meeting on the street was a lot more likely if it had involved Ms. Rushman rather than Stark. Barnes could almost picture it, if he let himself think about it. O'Connor wandering around the city, lost and confused; Ms. Rushman stepping out of a shop, laden with coffee cups just _begging_ to be spilled. Yeah, he'd bet that was how it had happened. A real meet-cute.

That was when he finally identified the feeling that had been churning in his gut ever since Ms. Rushman had made her appearance, since he'd seen that kiss, the ease between her and O'Connor. It was simple, really: it was petulance, it was _disgust_ , that somehow even a complete asshole like _that guy_ had a more successful love life than he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments are welcome :) Next chapter on Sunday!


	3. Chapter 3

_He made to leave, but after a couple of steps he stumbled, and that's when I noticed._

_"You're hurt," I said._

_"It's nothing," he replied._

_"Doesn't look like nothing." And it wasn't: the thug's knife had pierced the fabric of his suit and he was bleeding. "You need stitches." But he couldn't go to a hospital, could he? So I said, "I don't live far from here, how about—_

Barnes paused in his reading of what he'd been made to expect was a proper witness account, given that it had started with 'Guys, you'll never believe what happened to me the other night' and proceeded with a very accurate rendition of the fear and panic that could seize a person not trained to fight when they were assaulted. He paused, and narrowed his eyes, because suddenly the narrative had taken a _turn_ —the kind of turn that was becoming irritatingly familiar.

Frowning, he scrolled down and quickly found his suspicions confirmed, his eyes skimming over words like 'sculpted abs' (Nomad's side wound appeared to have magically healed itself), 'bouncy buttocks', and 'crotch zipper' ( _again_ ) before he gave up with an exasperated groan and closed the tab.

He leaned back in his chair and dragged both hands down his face, then back up so he could massage his forehead. He wasn't getting a headache so much as a deep feeling of tiredness from this kind of thing: what some people came up with and wrote about and published and the way they published it.

True, most of them did it right, marking and tagging their fictional works so that, once Barnes had understood the system, it had become easy for him to set them aside during his search. But not all users were that helpful. A not insignificant amount of them even strove to do the exact opposite. They seemed to enjoy pushing the pretense as far as it could go, presenting their fantasies as a genuine retelling of events—when they were anything but. Hell, Barnes had stumbled upon blogs exclusively dedicated to that kind of tale, one following the other and building the story of an entire relationship, an entire life, all completely made-up.

Sorting through those was a pain, because their very concept was to look exactly like actual testimonies. A lot of them did it flawlessly, too—until they didn't. What clued Barnes in wasn't always the porn. Sometimes it was medical inaccuracies; the plot becoming increasingly elaborate, usually with the character getting involved in Nomad's investigation; gross misconceptions about police and hospital procedures; and so on. On one memorable occasion, a narrator had started their account claiming that they were a journalist, only to prove, with every single absurd decision they made, that they just couldn't be. That one especially had infuriated Barnes. All of them did, in a way: checking them all took time and energy he would rather have spent on better things—like the genuine testimonies he occasionally managed to dig up.

Those were a whole other kind of frustrating. Sure, they had the merit of being true. But most of them were seriously lacking when it came to actual, exploitable intel. Time and place were always left too vague. The sighting or rescue had happened 'two days ago' or 'after work' or 'after last call'; it had taken place 'two blocks away from the bar' or 'on my way home from work' or 'as I was going to the store'. No place names, no addresses, no mention of hours or minutes. And while Barnes had done much worse than dig through someone's social media accounts for the sake of a story, it wasn't something he particularly enjoyed—mostly because sifting through inane posts about other people's lives was almost _insufferably boring_. Worse, by the end of it, he often _still_ failed to narrow down what neighborhood they meant when they wrote that they were 'walking their dog to the park'. As a consequence, Barnes' map and timeline of Nomad's appearances remained decidedly patchy.

The rest wasn't much better. Only rarely did the witnesses mention anything about Nomad's appearance beyond what was already well-established—when they didn't contradict it completely—or about his fighting technique, because they 'could barely see anything' or 'it all went so fast' they 'didn't even understand what was happening'.

The only useful thing they focused on was the aftermath. On that, at least, Barnes had been able to gather a decent amount of material. Now he knew that depending on the gravity of the situation, Nomad would either let the would-be assailant run away, or tie them up before asking the victim or witnesses to call the police. In the latter cases, he stuck around until the sirens announced that the cops were closing in. In the former, it depended on the state of the people he'd helped. If they were okay he didn't linger, dashing off with a two-fingered salute. If they weren't, he would ask them what they needed and would then help them call a friend, or find a cab, or make their way home, or to the hospital, or to the police station. Those accounts Barnes read with the utmost attention. But as far as he could tell, Nomad sticking around never really led to any conversation. If words were exchanged, they centered exclusively around the person who'd been attacked. When it came to him, the hero remained discreet, keeping his cards close to his chest. That, or he only shared with people he knew wouldn't blab about it online. Which was clever of him, but absolutely no use to Barnes.

What it all boiled down to was, despite all the hours—all the _days_ —Barnes had already spent on that line of investigation, he had very little to show for it. And what he did have wasn't exactly substantial.

With a half frustrated, half exhausted sigh, he pushed back from his desk—and startled when, almost at once, something landed on his thighs: Alpine, who'd been lurking, waiting for an opening. He turned on himself twice, then lay down in Barnes' lap like he owned the place. Barnes let him, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears. He let that distract him for a minute, enjoying the sound of Alpine's purr, the feeling of it underneath his palm. When he looked back up, the screen of his laptop had gone dark. The piles of papers and pictures littering the surface of his desk seemed to have grown even messier while he wasn't looking, but they still weren’t as messy as the display on the cork boards behind it.

He was suddenly very aware of the silence and darkness surrounding him. Without him noticing, they had taken over his whole flat.

Finally, he admitted it to himself: he was getting nowhere with this. Maybe going out and roaming through the city at night _was_ the better option, no matter how vain it felt whenever he came back from yet another unfruitful expedition. But doing that more often meant more time taken out of his already dismal sleep schedule, with everything that meant for his health and for the quality of his work—and he couldn’t allow his work to suffer.

Unless the risk was worth it. Discouraged as he was feeling right that instant, he suddenly wondered, throat closing up: was it? Was there really no other way for him to get the recognition he strove for? No other topic, no other story? Becca would take it one step further and ask: did he even need that recognition? He already had the respect of his colleagues at work, even of his boss. What more did he need?

He always felt self-conscious whenever she asked that, small and petty like a child who, upon being gifted a toy, threw a tantrum because it wanted _more_. He didn't understand it himself, that want, that hunger really, didn't know where it came from. He only knew that it was there, hot and gnawing and as impossible to ignore as the fear that lined it: that someone else would come along, someone more talented or more settled, someone who didn't even care about honors, and yet would get all of it anyway—the story, the recognition, the prizes—snatching them right from under Barnes' nose. No matter what Becca said, Barnes knew that, to most of his peers, he was still nothing but a young upstart, a newcomer with some potential, true, who might go on to do great things, but who was just as likely to fizzle out and fade into oblivion. He still had to prove himself. ‘No, you don't,’ Becca would've protested, but that was easy for her to say, with her brilliant career at the State Department, solving diplomatic crises left and right. _That_ sure hadn't been a path their parents had ever expressed doubts over.

Chasing after masked men who ran around wearing capes might not be the best way to assuage their worries or to convince the Pulitzer prize jury of one's merits, though. Barnes had latched onto that topic because…because that was the question everyone had been asking after the Chitauri invasion: who were those people, whom were they working for, why were they doing this? Because it raised many others, about society, about law enforcement, about justice, about the concepts of right and wrong. Because trying to answer them all had seemed like a challenge. Because others had failed, so what if he, James B. Barnes, could be the one to succeed?

But there were other topics, less flashy maybe, but more urgent, more real. More tragic. ‘I got no love for capes or plunging V-necks,’ O'Connor had said, and maybe he was on to something. The guy had good instincts. Maybe superheroes really weren't the way to do it.

But if not that, then what?

-

Barnes was still wondering about that a few days later when he came into work and was stopped by Henricks before he could even sit down.

"Elle wants to see you in her office," Henricks said. His voice and expression were wary, which Barnes didn't understand—he hadn't arrived in an obviously bad mood—until he stepped through Elle's door and found O'Connor already there. As it turned out, they were getting a new topic to work on together.

After the success of what Barnes now realized had been an experimental run, he really should've seen it coming.

O'Connor didn't seem too put out by the prospect of another collaboration. Barnes briefly envisioned protesting, only to realize almost at once that it would have no effect whatsoever. They'd already proven that they could function as a team, and function well. That left him with a serious lack of legs to stand on. His dislike for O'Connor wasn't an argument Elle would've accepted even back when it had been full-blown scorn. She had little care for her employees' comfort, as long as they brought her results—and she had no patience for those who weren't professional enough to overcome their personal hang-ups in order to do so.

With that in mind, Barnes nodded resignedly. At least this time he went into it knowing what to expect.

That was the start of a trend. Well, more than a trend actually, but it took a few months and more than a few iterations of the same scene for Barnes to start suspecting what was really going on. Yet it wasn't until he came in one morning to see that Henricks and O'Connor were switching desks that it fully dawned on him: they'd been made partners.

Barnes made sure that none of what he felt showed on his face—neither surprise nor embarrassment over his own obliviousness. He even returned the smile O'Connor threw at him with a small one of his own. And, as he settled at his desk, he realized that he didn't mind that turn of events as much as he would have if he’d known that this was Elle's endgame when she'd first assigned them the same story.

He should have suspected that it was, though. Ever since he'd been transferred to the investigation team, Elle had paired him up with pretty much every one of their colleagues at one point or another. Not all those experiments had ended in disaster—not like that time with Ellison—but Barnes hadn't really clicked with anyone either. A lot of them already had a partner that suited them better, and the others just didn't fit.

It wasn't that they did anything _wrong_ , not exactly, but… They weren't ready to go as far as Barnes sometimes felt he had to go for a story. They had a hard time following his line of thought, which always moved in leaps and bounds and which he wasn't always able to reconstruct in a way that was helpful to them. They found his suggestions—for angles, for strategies, for leads—strange, or unrealistic, or too risky, or plain crazy and therefore not worth it. They profoundly disliked the way he'd dismiss their ideas whenever he found them useless, or the way he’d cover the first draft of any article with countless comments, even if most of them were justified. Sometimes he found leads that they were reluctant to explore, because doing so wouldn't be easy, would mean a lot of phone calls, a lot of running around, a lot of sifting through heaps of probably useless data, a lot of danger even, with no guarantee that it would pan out. Often, they refused to stay too late or to come in on a weekend, because they had other things to get to: a family, a significant other, a hobby, a fucking _dog_.

With O'Connor, with _Grant_ , a lot of those problems just weren't there. He was still an insufferable asshole, but he had a quick mind. Only rarely did he fail to follow Barnes' logic, and when that happened, he knew how to plant himself like a tree until he got an explanation he found satisfactory. He didn't care how abruptly or impatiently Barnes delivered it. Hell, he _never_ cared about Barnes' tone, so long as the content of the message was worth something. No matter how curt or uncompromising or even insulting Barnes sometimes became, he took it in stride—and, more often than not, dished it right back. He still stood up for his ideas and forced Barnes to do the same.

Once they'd agreed on a direction, though, no matter how ugly or loud the process had become, Grant buckled down, and got to work, and he was relentless: neither the quantity, nor the complexity, nor the tediousness of the task deterred him. He was reckless too, came up with the wildest plans, which Barnes had realized during their second joint investigation. They’d been hitting nothing but dead ends, knowing that there was something fishy with the building project they’d been looking into but unable to find anything to confirm their suspicions via the usual channels. Tired and exasperated, Barnes had slipped up and said, "You know who'd know something? The Russians." Those mobsters always did. Not that one was supposed to know that, much less _say_ it, and Barnes had almost regretted opening his mouth.

But then Grant had said, "Okay. Let's go ask them, then."

Barnes had stared at him, because—because that was exactly the kind of things _he_ would suggest, only for his partner to look at him like he was deranged. Or, worse, to start lecturing him on how it was never a good idea to get involved with the mob, especially in a way that meant that one would owe them a favor, as if Barnes was stupid and didn't _know_ that and wouldn't plan accordingly. Grant had done none of that. Instead, he’d volunteered to be the one going, and gone, and come back with a _bunch_ of new leads, no payment required.

"How the fuck did you manage that?" Barnes had asked.

Grant had smiled. "Turns out they're not too fond of the project either. It ain't theirs, and it infringes on their turf."

So he didn't mind throwing himself at danger, or rubbing elbows with less than savory characters. He never complained about overtime either, never protested that he had someone waiting for him at home—to the point that Barnes wondered what that meant for his relationship with Ms. Rushman, until he realized that she was probably just as busy as he was, if not more, herding Stark around.

What it boiled down to was, their partnership was working. As time went by, it even grew less explosive. They learned to be less wary of each other; understood that, if the other had something to suggest or doubts to express, then there was probably something to it, and it was worth at least _listening to_.

On the other hand, they also found out that whenever the both of them were stumped, starting a fight was an almost infallible way to make new, exploitable ideas emerge.

The office learned to just leave them to it—and to be wary of the times when they both remained quiet, because _that_ was when something was truly wrong. But even that happened only rarely.

Barnes resisted for a long time before he admitted it to himself: he _enjoyed_ this new situation. It was a new feeling. He'd never had this before: a partner whom he could consistently rely on for his instincts, his convictions, his involvement, his respect for the work they were doing. Someone who never shied from hard work and never backed down, unless he had a good reason to believe that he should. Someone who, simply put, could finally _keep up_.

-

Before he knew it, Bucky found that his daily rhythm had changed.

He made his way to the office in the morning, and no matter how early it was Grant would've preceded him and would be waiting for him out front. He always looked alert, ready to face the day, even when the previous one had dragged late into the night. Bucky reacted to that with a resentful glare.

"I don't need a lot of sleep," Grant explained once, almost apologetic, but the only thing that really mellowed Bucky out was the coffee he brought with him. Or it did once Bucky had confronted him about the disgusting swill he guzzled and taught him what actual coffee was supposed to taste like.

"Oh, I know," Grant had said, not even trying to defend himself. "It just reminds me of home."

Still bleary, Bucky had muttered, "It's no surprise you left, then," only to belatedly realize that this might not be something he could joke about.

Grant had taken it in stride, though, and muttered wryly, "You should've seen the food," before stepping inside.

Bucky wasn't sure that he _did_ want to see, especially given that, unlike coffee, Grant seemed quite happy to leave Amish cuisine behind him and to take full advantage of what New York City had to offer. Whenever they were at the office, the clock never struck twelve without him picking up the phone to place an order. He seemed to have the number of every decent takeout place in a three-mile radius memorized and was on a first-name basis with all their owners and delivery guys. They were always delighted to hear from him, which didn't come as a surprise given how much he bought and tipped. He knew all their menus by heart, but after a while he asked for one to be included in the delivery so that the next time he ordered from that place, he could slide the flyer over to Bucky and say, "Here, pick something."

Midday didn't always find them at their desks, though. Sure, there were emails to be read, phone calls to be made, meetings to be attended, words to be written. But half the time their search for information took them outside—and apart. Bucky reveled in being able to go about his appointed tasks confident that his partner would do the same, that there was no need to trail after him to make sure that he did things properly. He felt like he covered twice as much ground in half the time. He and Grant only stuck together when they planned to try and go somewhere they shouldn't, be it because it was technically forbidden, or dangerous, or liable to yield information that'd require them to react quickly, or all of the above.

After, when they reconvened at the office, Grant would inevitably come back with a box of pastries, ready to force Bucky to pick at least one. Similarly, he never went into the break room without coming back with a fresh cup of coffee for Bucky.

"Thanks," Bucky would say.

Grant would simply nod and ask, "What you got here?"

Bucky would show him, Grant leaning in to look at the screen or document over Bucky’s shoulder, his hand coming to rest on the back of Bucky’s chair. They'd discuss it a bit and if it was any good they'd exchange a grin, and Grant would pat Bucky on the shoulder before returning to his desk.

He was surprisingly good with computers and electronics, as proven by the many digital locks he’d sliced to let them enter places they definitely weren’t allowed to be in. But it was his way with words, his knack for finding the exact right turn for a sentence that Bucky appreciated the most. These days, whenever he got stuck on a paragraph that remained awkward no matter how much he tweaked it, all he needed to do was hand it over. Grant would look at it for a minute, with that annoying lock of hair flopping down onto his forehead and that tiny fold of concentration between his eyebrows—and then suddenly he would blink, and push his glasses back up his nose, and reach for a pen. "Got it."

"Yeah?" Bucky would ask, and eagerly take the sheet when Grant handed it back over. And Grant always did.

Bucky might've developed a complex, if not for the moments when Grant's talents reached their limits. Like when they led interviews. While he was great at coming up with the right questions, he was terrible when it came to _asking_ them. More often than not, the person opposite became skittish, or vexed, or scared, or plain uncooperative. It was much better when Barnes stepped in, smooth and smiling. That was something he'd always been good at: being charming, pleasing people, making them like him and want to help him—provided he had the right incentive. The rest of the time, when there was nothing to be gained from it, he'd long since learned not to bother.

With their abilities combined, he and Grant made good headway every day, no matter which topics they worked on, some of which Bucky knew he would never have been able to tackle on his own.

When the day drew to a close, they packed up and went home—much earlier than Bucky was used to. That was the last consequence of having a partner who worked as hard as he did: even when they did end up having to stay late to finish something, they still were done long before Bucky would've been, had he been working at it alone. And so for the first time in years, he found himself with plenty of free time in the evenings, and even on the weekends.

He was at a loss for what to do with it at first. He caught up on some sleep; read a couple of books he'd been meaning to get to for ages and leafed through the issues of _Science Magazine_ and _Nature_ that had been piling up on his coffee table; visited a couple exhibitions at the Hall of Science and at the Museum of Natural History; went to the gym and got in some of that extra workout his krav maga instructor always recommended.

He only half-heartedly increased the time he spent on the Nomad project. He still browsed forums and blogs, still took very long walks home from time to time, on the off-chance that something might happen (it didn't). But the doubts that had arisen all those weeks ago hadn't abated. Unless something changed, or unless he found a better method to conduct his search, he felt that it was best to leave things be.

Instead of throwing himself into that, he finally took Becca up on her standing invitation and traveled down to D.C. one weekend to see her. What's more, he gathered his courage and patience a few weeks later to make an appearance at their parents' for a family dinner. Everyone commented on how well he looked. His Ma even said, "You've put on weight!" which in her mouth was a compliment: usually she complained that he was too skinny. Bucky didn't let his eyebrow twitch, bearing it easily enough. Just as he bore the follow-up question—"Did you meet someone?"—even though he couldn't for the life of him see how the two might be related.

Being better rested really worked wonders.

-

All in all, Bucky would've been very satisfied with this partnership—if not for a few snags.

Well, one main snag, really.

It wasn't that Grant was an asshole—that Bucky actually liked. He liked to have something to push back against, someone who wouldn't back down and wouldn't be vexed when Bucky didn't either. He liked that Grant never pretended with him, not since that first strange conversation they'd had about Bucky's arc reactor article. With their colleagues, with the interviewees, Grant still tried to play nice. But with Bucky, he was nothing but completely himself. It felt precious, in a way. Bucky couldn't be sure, but he felt that that wasn't something Grant let happen with a lot of people.

It wasn't the fact that Grant tended to get too invested in their work either—not in the sense that he devoted too much of his time to it, since Bucky was guilty of the same, but that he grew too invested emotionally. Any form of injustice made him incensed and, with the topics they handled, there was a lot of injustice to be found. Sure, it fueled his motivation. But it also made him biased, in ways that affected his work. His and Bucky’s most violent fights were always about the approach they should take on an article when Grant couldn't condone taking both sides into account—even though that was the job. He cared so much—too much, really—about so many things. Bucky didn't know how he did it: it had to be exhausting. Still, that was something he could respect, even if he didn't quite understand it.

No, the actual snag was something else entirely. Something that actually seemed to contradict the care Grant so often displayed.

It took a while for Bucky to notice the pattern. But once he had, he couldn't _not_ notice it. Grant would be working and suddenly stop, he would be talking and suddenly trail off, his eyes losing their focus as he frowned faintly. Then he would blink, and look up, and grow awkward, and say, "I forgot my wallet." Or his keys, or his phone, and so of course he had to go look for it. Except that, most of the time, he didn't recall where or when he‘d lost it, so that going to fetch it could mean he'd disappear for hours. Other times he said, "I have an appointment"—at the bank, or the doctor, or with a plumber, or an electrician, with the same result: he needed to go, and go _now_.

The obvious conclusion would've been that Bucky’s partner was a complete scatterbrain. Only that didn't make sense, not when one saw how focused, how clever the man was, how easily he remembered the most minute details. Something was up.

Bucky watched him leave every time, his own frown deepening, and picked up the habit of tracking how long Grant stayed gone, what state he came back in. Once he did, he understood what was really going on.

Grant, upon his returns, always looked distinctly rumpled. His clothes had the messy look of items that had been discarded in a heap then hastily put back on. His ties especially were creased the way ties always ended up when they'd been re-tied. Seeing them, Bucky could almost hear his grandmother, who'd taught him a dozen ways to tie a knot, scolding: _Never try to tie a tie twice!_ And if all those clues hadn't been enough, once Grant didn't just make it back half-disheveled, but also with an unmistakable streak of red lipstick at the edge of his mouth.

So there you had it: Grant wasn't falling victim to an early-onset form of Alzheimer’s. No, he was just feigning forgetfulness as a flimsy excuse to sneak off and meet his girlfriend, one Ms. Rushman, for an afternoon quickie. Bucky could hardly believe it at first, if only because it clashed with Grant's overall dedication. Then he grew _incensed_ —because how _typical_. How disappointingly _pedestrian_ , that that man's main fault turned out to be his _dick,_ like it was for so many other straight men.

Grant's only saving grace was that these trysts didn't mean that he slacked off. He might disappear for hours right in the middle of the day, but he always came back. And when he did, he went straight back to work, concentrating twice as hard and staying late to make up for all the time he'd missed. He did so consistently. Bucky knew: he'd measured it.

It didn't make him less furious, or any less tempted to confront Grant about it. To ask him _why_. But he had to be honest with himself: he wasn't sure that, if he'd had a lover who looked like Ms. Rushman—or the male version of her, at any rate—he wouldn't…at least _very seriously_ consider dropping everything to come running the second they snapped their fingers, especially given that she and Grant didn't have a lot of opportunities to see each other, what with Ms. Rushman being so busy keeping Stark on the straight and narrow.

That, and part of Bucky was, well, almost afraid that if he asked Grant why, Grant would _actually answer_. That he would explain exactly what made his girlfriend's call so impossible to resist; in excruciating, _explicit_ detail.

Bucky wasn't ready for that. So he decided that, since the quality of Grant's work didn't suffer, and as long as it didn't, he would keep his remarks to himself. He would keep that card close to his chest, ready to be slammed down on the day he might really need it.

It wasn't him backing down. He just already had more than enough mental scars from his internet searches on Nomad. He didn't need any more, was all.

-

Speaking of his Nomad project, Barnes was still letting it pretty much languish, waiting for something to change. Yet he was entirely unprepared when something _did_.

It started with a few reports on the internet, rumors that people didn't believe, about another superhero becoming active in New York. That in itself wouldn't have been too unrealistic, given that before Nomad there had already been Daredevil, and that after him some guy calling himself Spiderman had started popping up all over Queens. The difference was that this superhero, while showing up alone some of the time, seemed to mostly be seen in Nomad's company. He told people to call him Falcon, which was explained by the tales according to which he had _wings_.

Barnes followed those stories with a healthy dose of skepticism, waiting for some actual, visual evidence to emerge.

It did.

From time to time, Nomad got involved in something more serious than an attempted mugging at 1 a.m. This time, it happened in broad daylight. A high-rise had caught fire, which had spread quickly through one of the middle floors and made it tricky for the fire department to evacuate the ones above it, some of which were too high for the ladder to reach. Given that the building was residential and that it was the middle of the day in the middle of the week, not many people were in there, but still.

People had clustered nearby, as they were wont to do, and with them came countless cameras, both amateur and press. A news helicopter joined them after a while, so that everyone saw when Nomad arrived—and how. Not from the ground, but from the skies, dropped onto the roof by a man who indeed had wings, and who then used them to carry down to the ground the people whom Nomad got out of the building's upper floors: a cleaning lady, an elderly man, a young couple and their small dog, and so on. Once everyone had been safely brought down and Nomad had signed the all-clear, the winged man checked one last time that everyone was all right and no one missing. Policemen tried to approach him—to catch him, really—but he skillfully avoided them, kicking off and pirouetting in the sky with a grin and a whoop before darting away. By the time anyone stopped gaping and remembered that he hadn't been alone, the roof of the building was empty, Nomad nowhere to be seen.

Barnes followed all this from the office, staring at one of the screens constantly set on the news with his heart beating fast and his phone stuck to his ear. He was trying to reach Grant, who'd gone to the National Archives that morning with promises to return around midday with lunch, but never had. Barnes hoped that it was because he'd gotten wind of what was going on and had made a detour to go see it for himself and hopefully gather some data, quotes, and witness accounts. Grant, however, wasn't answering. Barnes swore. If this was one of those times the man had up and left to go roll in the hay with his girlfriend, he was going to _kill_ him.

"Who gets the story?" Lawson asked, once again saying what everyone was thinking. "It's all over social media, we need to be on this."

Elle, who'd been watching the screens with her arms crossed and one quirked eyebrow, minutely pursed her lips. "I suppose we do," she said, only to demonstrate how low this ranked on her list of priorities by giving the topic to _Castillo_ , of all people.

Barnes briefly wondered whether he should speak up, whether now was the time to tell her about what he'd been working on. Surely with this new development the story was starting to look like a valid topic, even for him. Still, he hesitated. Elle noticed his shifting and her eyes snapped to him.

"Barnes," she said, "where are we with the background piece on the Garcia trial?"

"Um," Barnes said. In all the commotion he'd completely forgotten what he and Grant had been working on for the past few days.

Fortunately, Grant chose that moment to reappear, stepping out of the elevator with a pastry box in one hand and a thick folder in the other.

"What's going on?" he asked once he'd reached their desks, bemusedly looking at the buzzing office around them. As it turned out, buried as he'd been in judicial records, he'd completely missed the event of the day. He was lucky that the box he'd brought contained a warm chicken pot pie with two forks, which appeased Bucky some, and that his archive dig had been very informative, which did the same to Elle.

So Barnes was spared, and Castillo kept the story about New York's winged vigilante. It didn't mean that Barnes gave up on it entirely. When he went home that night, he sat down at his desk with renewed purpose. He'd wanted a change, and what a change this was: Nomad had a partner, now. A partner who, if the tales that had started circulating even before today were to be believed, acted both with him and independently. Which meant that the chances of a sighting, the chances of a slip-up, had doubled—especially now, with Falcon so new to the scene and to the rules of the game. All of that in a context of renewed attention from both the media and the public. Barnes wouldn't be the only one going after him: someone was bound to get _something_.

The true boon, however, was Falcon's gear. Nomad had a tactical suit, but Falcon's wings were on another level entirely. That was high level technology, military-grade technology, the kind that average citizens had no idea could exist and no hope of ever accessing. Yet Falcon had, and he used them with an ease that spoke of _years_ of training, most probably in a military setting too.

 _That_ was a lead.

-

Barnes spent a couple hours jotting down his thoughts and outlining the various lines of inquiry that Falcon's arrival had opened up. After that, he decided to take a look at the internet: he was curious to see what people were saying, what theories they were coming up with. Who knew, maybe they'd point out some aspects of the matter that he'd overlooked.

The very first thing he stumbled upon, however, was yet _another_ piece of fiction.

> **A Helping Hand** (Nomad/Falcon, 8,5k, Explicit)
> 
> _Falcon gets injured in a fight. Nomad brings him back to their secret caravan for some well-deserved TLC_.
> 
> Tags: nomad/falcon, established relationship, light angst, fluff, blowjob, anal fingering, cuddling, careful sex because of injury, porn with feelings, secret caravan of love

Barnes stared. "What."

…Maybe he'd gotten his hopes up too fast when it came to internet content.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments are welcome! Next chapter on Tuesday :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I should give **blanket warning** for Alexander Pierce making an appearance.

So Barnes couldn't rely on the internet in his search for Nomad. What else was new? It didn't matter. He didn't need the internet to make progress.

Of all the leads Falcon's arrival had opened up, the military connection remained the most promising one. It was either current, former, or non-existent. Option one was the most worrying, in a way, if only because of the numerous questions it raised. What would the army gain by getting involved in the superhero business? At best, it hinted at society becoming militarized to an as-yet unprecedented degree, which no one could be enthused by. At worst, it pointed at the existence of a massive threat that required the deployment of independent agents while still being kept secret from the public.

Option two was better, and slightly more likely. Although if there had been a connection that had since been severed, the military definitely wouldn't be happy about it, especially since it appeared that Falcon hadn't just left, but taken some tech with him: the wings, and who knew what else. That meant an investigation, which in turn meant more chances that the man—and his partner—would be unmasked. It was one thing to have fans and gossip rags and the police after you. Being chased by the US military was a whole other ball game.

Unless they were dealing with option three, and Falcon's wings hadn't come from a military lab at all. But then where had he obtained them? They weren't the kind of machinery that any random person could conceptualize, engineer, and then build in their garage. One would not only need a deep understanding of physics and mechanics, but also possess the forging tools and the means to acquire the necessary materials. The people filling those criteria were few and far between—and, among them, the most likely candidate was none other than Tony Stark himself. Which would make sense, if one remembered that Nomad's first appearance had been at Iron Man's side, during the Battle of New York. Was that it, then? Was Falcon part of the Avengers, a new recruit? And was Stark their unofficial equipment provider, despite his decision to stop Stark Industries from manufacturing weapons?

Over the next few weeks, all of Barnes' free time was spent looking into all of that. He wasn't the only one doing so. Castillo and his lumbering aside, other reporters had started to suspect the involvement of the military—and the strong rebuke from its officials that their poking around had been met with only strengthened the feeling that something was afoot. Fortunately for Barnes, he was owed a few favors from the time of his Hammer Tech piece. By calling some of them in, he was able to hear of at least two internal investigations that had been launched relating to the matter. So if the military was indeed involved, it wasn't in any official capacity. It hadn't been sanctioned through regular channels.

Barnes decided to wait and see how that evolved. In the meantime, he focused his attention on Stark. Who knew, the two lines of investigation might even turn out to be related. Stark might've stepped down from his position as CEO of Stark Industries, and the company might've stopped producing weapons, but interpersonal relations didn't disappear from one day to the next. Stark's close friendship with the recently promoted Colonel James R. Rhodes was well-known and, during the Battle of New York, the Avengers had counted the Hulk among their ranks, who everyone agreed had to be the result of a military experiment—although no one was sure whether it had been a _successful_ one or not.

Barnes kept all of that in mind and hunted for videos and pictures of Falcon's wings. Stark's tech tended to have a specific look and feel to it, which he was sure he would recognize if he could get a close enough look at that jetpack. Unfortunately, most of the images he found were no use. They'd been taken from too far away, they were blurry, the resolution or lighting was poor… For all that he was new, Falcon was already quite good at evading capture, both by the police and on film.

The best way to find anything concrete would be to ask Stark himself. If he was behind those wings, he wouldn't come out and admit it, but he was known for his tendency to ramble, especially when it came to science and engineering. Barnes could simply ask him what he thought of Falcon's gear, and see what Stark let slip as he answered.

That was, if it was possible for him to obtain an interview—which, despite Stark being one of the _Bulletin_ 's main shareholders, wasn't likely to happen. Barnes had sent many requests over the years, and the man never even bothered to answer with a no.

Barnes knew of one time and place where he'd be able to find him, though: Stark's annual Christmas gala, which this year took place eight days after Thanksgiving, on December's eve, and to which all the employees of the _Bulletin_ were invited as a courtesy. Not all the companies for which Stark was a major investor benefitted from such treatment. Either Stark had a soft spot for the newspaper, or this had to do with Elle pulling strings. Barnes would've bet on the latter. He was thankful for it.

Putting on his best suit and coming to the gala didn't mean that he automatically had an opportunity to draw Stark into conversation, though. The guest list for the event was long, and as its host Stark was pretty much constantly occupied with greeting them one after the other. One couldn't just walk up to him and interrupt—even less so given that he wasn't alone, keeping one Dr. Bruce Banner at his side despite the poor man's obvious discomfort.

Barnes was surprised that Dr. Banner had shown up in the first place, but not that he'd been invited. He'd been so thrilled when the news had spread that Stark had not only found the scientist but managed to convince him to come work with him on the Arc Reactor technology. Barnes had been following Dr. Banner's research for years, since the man's first publications, and found it profoundly compelling. He'd even written a piece about it, which had been in his portfolio when he'd applied at the _Bulletin_ and which he was convinced had contributed to his recruitment. That was why he'd been so frustrated when the army had snatched Dr. Banner up, making all his subsequent work classified—and why he'd been so disappointed when that partnership had gone up in flames, ending with Dr. Banner quitting both his military lab _and_ research to go on an indefinite sabbatical. Barnes didn't know what Stark had said or promised or given to convince Dr. Banner to come back, but he was profoundly glad that it had worked. He'd been keeping track of their progress ever since.

Come to think of it, Dr. Banner joining Stark Industries had happened right around the Chitauri attack. Barnes wondered how involved the man had been in that. How much he knew. Had he met the other Avengers? Did he know who they really were? On the heels of that thought came another: had any of the Avengers been invited tonight? Were any of them present in the room right now?

Barnes let his eyes wander over the crowd and tried to think rationally. The Hulk and Thor were out for the obvious reason that they would both have been impossible to miss. Black Widow and Hawkeye might be around, but if Barnes was right and they'd been loaned by one of the US alphabet agencies, they'd be blending right in. Barnes didn't think that he'd be able to identify them on sight. With Nomad he would've had more of a shot—which was why Nomad couldn't be here. Of all the Avengers after Iron Man, he was the one who'd been the most scrutinized, the most filmed and photographed, sometimes from up close. There were entire blogs devoted to comparing the lower half of his face and his body shape to that of every single tall and broad-shouldered man internet users came across in New York. Given that tonight was a Stark event, any guest fitting that description was bound to receive the same treatment. It'd be too risky for whoever Nomad was to show up.

That left Stark the only sure bet. The man was still clinging to Dr. Banner, although now Ms. Rushman had joined them, looking even more stunning than Barnes had remembered her being. He fleetingly wondered if she'd arrived with Grant, whom he hadn't seen yet. Had she come as his plus one, or had he come as hers, or had they used separate invitations? As he pondered that, an idea formed in his mind. Maybe for once Grant's invasive personal life could be useful. Maybe Barnes could get him to ask his girlfriend to introduce him directly to Stark.

That, or he could brazenly walk up to them under the pretense of wanting to talk to Dr. Banner about his work—which wouldn't even be a complete lie.

He tried to figure out which one of these options was the least terrible—or the most likely to get him where he wanted, that is to say talking to Stark about Falcon's wings. Since he was standing at the buffet, he grabbed a plate and started loading it with elaborate canapés and puff pastries while his mind toyed with hypotheses and likely outcomes. He'd just picked up a verrine of what looked like avocado cream topped with bits of lox and two sprigs of chive when someone behind him said, "Would you be so kind as to hand me one of those too?"

"Sure," Barnes said, picking up another of the tiny glasses and turning around, "there you—" He froze when he saw the person standing there, a bit closer than he'd expected; when he met a pair of blue eyes he knew, in a face he knew—because everyone in the country did. "—go," he finished faintly, and swallowed. "Secretary Pierce."

The Secretary of State smiled and held out his plate. Barnes glanced down at it, remembered, and awkwardly put the verrine on it. The gestured felt incongruously intimate.

"Sorry, I—" He took a small step back, almost bumping into the buffet, and scolded himself at once, because _come on, Barnes, pull it together_. But this was _Alexander Goodwin Pierce_ , the most influential member of President Ellis' government and also, incidentally, the one man every journalist in the country wanted a chance to talk to—a chance that they never got.

Barnes cleared his throat, and straightened, and held out his hand. "I'm—"

"James Barnes," Secretary Pierce finished for him. "I know." Both his hands were busy holding his plate and a glass of champagne, but he put the latter down on the buffet table to shake Barnes' hand.

Barnes almost forgot to shake back he was so stunned. "You do?" he asked. Then he realized. "Oh, I see. My sister told you about me." Not that she'd let him know about it, the _idiot_.

The Secretary's brow folded in puzzlement. "Your sister?"

"Rebecca Barnes," Barnes prompted. "She works in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. She’s one of the Deputy Assistant Secretaries?" The youngest of them all, actually.

"I'm sorry to admit that I don't know her," Secretary Pierce said with a polite smile. "I only know about you because I've read some of your articles."

Barnes' heart gave a wild thump. "You have?"

"Yes. Very compelling reads, all of them. I particularly liked the one you wrote a couple of years ago about that embezzlement scandal at the Swedish embassy."

"That's…" Barnes had no idea how to react to that. "That's very nice of you to say."

"Would you tell me more about your work on that?" Secretary Pierce said, like this wasn't polite small-talk, a few sentences exchanged as a courtesy before he moved on. Like he was genuinely interested, and interested enough to remain standing there, listening to Barnes and helping himself to the buffet table, asking questions and adding witty remarks that Barnes couldn't help but laugh at, instead of joining the countless important people who'd come here in the hopes of getting a word with him.

One such person approached them after a while, or so Barnes thought until he reluctantly glanced over and recognized Grant, who stood stiffly with a glass in his left hand and the right one buried in the pocket of his unflatteringly cut trousers. "Hi," he said.

"Hi," Barnes replied, because that was polite. Turning back to Pierce, he added, "Secretary Pierce, this is Grant O'Connor, my partner at the _Bulletin_.”

"Pleasure to meet you," Grant said with a smile that reached nowhere near his eyes.

"Indeed." Secretary Pierce gave him a faint nod but made no move to put down his glass for a handshake this time. Not that Grant had been expecting one: his right hand was still stuck in his pocket, while an odd expression had overtaken his face. It had a frozen quality to it, a tension, which only worsened when—after quick glance at him, at his bad haircut, at his ill-fitting suit—Secretary Pierce dismissed him entirely and ostensibly turned his attention back to Barnes.

"Now, James," he said—because one minute into their talk he'd asked, _May I call you James?_ and Barnes couldn't have been expected to say no, could he?—"I'm very interested to know more about that interview you did with the director of the Defense Logistics Agency back under the previous administration."

Barnes' breath almost caught at that. That interview had been a serious win for him, what had actually made the press world stop and look at him in the wake of the Hammer Tech scandal, because it was one thing to uncover a corruption case, but it was another to get the Department of Defense to issue any kind of detailed statement about it.

His reaction wasn't just due to the fact that the Secretary of State apparently knew about it and had even read it. Alexander G. Pierce was an experienced politician. He never did anything at random, especially not when it came to the media or his behavior or his choice of words. That he'd not only engage a young and notoriously ambitious reporter in conversation and compliment his work, but also mention his most remarked interview was no coincidence. He had to have a reason.

Barnes tried desperately not to get his hopes up as to what that reason might be.

Grant was still awkwardly standing there despite the Secretary's clear decision to just ignore him. Bucky threw him a glance, half-apologetic, half-warning— _Don't you fucking dare ruin this for me_ —before following Pierce's lead.

He didn't know if Grant had gotten the message, but eventually he detached himself from their sides and walked away, probably to go find his girlfriend. Barnes couldn't afford to check, focused as he was on not blowing this potential shot at propelling his career forward with another coup.

He did okay, he thought. They conversed a bit more, for about a dozen minutes. All the while Pierce remained smiling and attentive and…charming, really. It was a well-known fact about him, how magnetic he could be. Entire pieces had been devoted to the topic, trying and failing to deconstruct what boiled down to a well-honed gift, underlining the role it had played in Pierce's career. It was perceptible even from afar, even through a screen, but tonight was the first time Barnes had been confronted with it from up close, had it directed at him specifically. It was a struggle not to let it fluster him. Most of the time, he even succeeded.

Eventually though, someone walked up to them whom the Secretary couldn't turn away, and their conversation came to an end. Barnes gathered his courage and, before Secretary Pierce bid him goodbye, managed to get in a request. For an interview.

The Secretary paused. He smiled.

He didn't say no. He didn't say, _I believe my actions speak for themselves, don't you?_ Instead he reached into the inside pocket of his tailored jacket and held out a card. "I'll think about it," he said. "Do call my office in two weeks if you haven't heard anything by then."

"Thank you," Barnes managed to say, "I will."

With one last smile, the Secretary walked away, leaving Barnes standing there, card in hand, staring after him with his heart in his throat.

Holy. Fucking. _Shit_.

-

Barnes spent the rest of that evening feeling wired, to the point that when he went home afterwards he wasn't sure he would manage to fall asleep—and didn't realize it when he did. Instead he dreamed himself at the office, working and working, trying and failing to find the right way to introduce his interview. The room around him was deserted and dark, all his colleagues long gone—or maybe not all of them, for Barnes wasn't surprised when he felt a tall presence come to loom at his side.

He turned expecting Grant, but instead it was Nomad, standing there in his dark blue uniform, holding himself stiffly right at the edge of the light glowing from Barnes' desk lamp. And because he was half-hidden in the shadows, it took Barnes a few seconds to notice the stain expanding on his side.

"You're hurt," he said.

"It's nothing," Nomad replied.

"Doesn't look like nothing," Barnes retorted. Somehow, he knew that it was a bullet wound, and that Nomad should go to the hospital but couldn't. But he also knew that the office's first-aid kit didn't contain the proper supplies to deal with this, just like he didn't have the proper skills.

"It'll heal," Nomad said. He took a couple of steps and sat down in the chair tucked against Barnes' desk, right where Grant liked to settle whenever they needed to brainstorm or had lunch delivered. Nomad's posture was nothing like Grant's relaxed sprawl, though.

"Are you okay?" Barnes asked.

"I'm tired," Nomad replied. He looked it. "I'm tired of this city, of its corruption and misery, of how awful people can be to each other. I'm tired of all the lies. Of the secrecy." He looked up at Barnes. Behind the mask, his eyes were very blue. "I want to tell you everything."

Barnes' heart thumped. "You do?"

"Yes."

"Everything?"

"Yes."

"To me."

"Yes," Nomad said again. He reached up with both hands to push his cowl back from his face, and when he did—Barnes woke up. He wasn't at the office but in his bed, not working but sleeping. On his bedside table, the digital clock glowed: 3:58 a.m. Already the images of the dream were dissolving, running like water through his mind's fingers even as he tried to hold them back, leaving him with a faint feeling of frustration, because he'd almost seen, almost _known_.

In his boxers, his dick was uncomfortably, embarrassingly hard.

Careful not to ponder too hard over that, he sat up. Clumsily slid out of bed and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. As he drank it, Alpine appeared, brushing against his legs in an obvious attempt to coax some food out of him. It didn't work. Bucky gently but firmly pushed him away. Walked to the bathroom to pee. Went back to bed.

He resolutely did not jerk off.

-

By the time Monday rolled around Barnes had mostly recovered from both the gala and the dream. Starting a squabble with Grant the second they met in front of the _Bulletin_ brought him the rest of the way there.

It wasn't a serious one, just Bucky razzing his partner over his choice of drinks—Grant was so stubborn as to visit two separate shops to acquire both his tar and Bucky's coffee every morning—and Grant taking the obvious bait. From there it quickly and predictably devolved into a mock-scuffle, which carried them all the way to the elevator and into the office. It was quite an undignified entrance, but Bucky didn't care. Actually, he was so busy trying to elbow Grant in the ribs without spilling his drink that he didn't notice the huge bunch of red roses sitting on his desk until they'd almost knocked it over.

They quieted down after that, Bucky staring at the flowers with a puzzled frown. His first thought was that it was from Becca, although he couldn't see why. It wouldn't be his anniversary for months, he hadn't just finished a major piece or received any commendation, and Hanukkah was still several days away. It might've been a congratulatory bouquet for surviving Stark's gala, except that that wasn't Becca's brand of humor. Tucked among the flowers was a card, though.

_I've thought about it_ , it said, in a writing that wasn't Becca's _. 6 p.m. on Wednesday next week? AGP_

"So, what's the occasion?" asked Grant, who'd divested himself of his coat and scarf and sat down in his own chair, sipping at his to-go cup.

Bucky looked up at him, still gaping. "I got the interview," he said faintly, almost incredulously. Then he started grinning, pure elation rising in his chest. He felt like it'd keep climbing and carry him off floating, or like it'd burst out of him and soar into the sky to blow up, as colorful and triumphant as fireworks. "I got the interview!"

Grant looked amused. "What interview?"

"With Secretary Pierce. I asked him for one at the gala and—"

Grant paused with his cup halfway to his lips. He glanced at the flowers. "Secretary Pierce sent these?"

"Yes," Bucky said, and looked down at the card again to make sure that he hadn't dreamt it. But he hadn't: the card was really there, in his hand, it wasn't going to disappear.

No offense to Nomad, but this was _so much better_ than all of his secrets combined.

Grant was silent. His smile, Bucky noted when he glanced back up, had faded entirely, to be replaced by the strangest of expressions.

"What?" Bucky asked.

"Nothing," Grant said. "Just…" His gaze was drawn back to the roses. "I wasn't aware that offers for interviews came with flowers and love notes."

"Love—" Bucky huffed. "It isn't like that."

"Sure," Grant said, pivoting in his chair to turn on his computer. His tone made it obvious what he thought.

Bucky frowned. "It _isn't_ ," he insisted. "It's just—" He looked at the card, at the flowers, and realized that there was no obvious explanation. "He's just being courteously old-fashioned, is all."

"Is that what people are calling it these days?" Grant asked wryly.

"I would've thought you’d understand that," Bucky pointed out, "given where you're from."

Grant snorted. "Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?"

He was obviously avoiding looking at Bucky by staring at his loading screen. Bucky narrowed his eyes at him but, recognizing one of those strange moods Grant sometimes fell into without warning, decided to leave it at that. He turned on his own computer, then leaned back in his chair, craning his neck to try and see whether Elle was already in her office and whether she was busy.

He couldn't wait to tell her about the interview. He couldn't wait to see her _face_.

-

For the next week and a half, Barnes could hardly focus on anything that wasn't preparing the questions he'd ask. He read all the articles he could find about Alexander G. Pierce, about his upbringing and his career, about his achievements and decision-making, especially since he'd entered his office as Secretary of State. He looked up portrait after portrait—none of which came accompanied by actual quotes, because Secretary Pierce almost never gave any, much less sat down with a reporter to discuss _anything_. Barnes tried to remember what Becca had told him about working under the man, although there wasn’t much to remember: she usually remained tight-lipped about the actual content of her work, especially around her brother. That, and from what Secretary Pierce had said, they didn't seem to actually cross paths that often.

Grant's strange mood persisted all through that week, making him a lot quieter than usual. That was probably partly due to the fact that he was swamped with work, having had to shoulder Barnes’ load: even Elle had agreed that the interview should be Barnes’ first priority. Grant certainly looked sullen about it, and would react harshly when poked, so Barnes didn't. He'd find a way to make it up to him later. In the meantime, he spent hours with Urich and in Elle's office, discussing what perspective he should choose for his interview, what questions he should ask, how to formulate them, how to follow them up with others. On more than one occasion he would've liked Grant's input but had to do without.

It felt like forever and like no time had passed at all before the following week arrived. On Wednesday Barnes was jittery all through the work day, waiting for the moment he should leave the office—early, so as to make sure to be on time.

"Have fun on you date," Grant snarked when Bucky put on his coat.

"Oh, fuck off," Bucky retorted, but it was almost good-natured: nothing could bring his mood down tonight.

Later though, he found Grant's words echoing in his head.

He arrived at the address Pierce's secretary had sent him—a tall office building in Manhattan—with a few minutes to spare. However, instead of being escorted up to an office or to a conference room, he was told to wait in the lobby. When the clock struck six, the Secretary himself came down to meet him, and led him not to the elevator bank but outside, to a car with black tinted windows. It took them to a restaurant, where a private room was waiting with a single table set for two.

"I hope you don't mind," Secretary Pierce said once the door had closed behind his two bodyguards, who'd apparently guard it from the outside. "I've had quite enough of office spaces for the day and thought that our discussion would be more pleasant in a more relaxed setting. Besides, I'm quite famished. Are you?"

Barnes said that he was—a white lie—and thanked the Secretary for his consideration, even though he would've preferred for it not to manifest in this way. But now was not the time to complain. Secretary Pierce was already doing him a huge favor as it was; and it wouldn't do to start asking the most delicate questions he'd planned for with Pierce impatient or irritable because he was hungry.

So he let them both be seated and place an order for drinks—Pierce asked for a bottle of red wine, a choice Barnes wasn't sure how to interpret—then for food. With the waiter coming and going, it was impossible to start the interview properly, even less so once the entrées arrived. Barnes resigned himself to waiting until the meal was over, and in the meantime ceded the floor to the Secretary, who turned out to still have questions about Barnes' work. Barnes replied willingly enough—prudently, too, in case Pierce's purpose was to have confirmation that he was making the right decision by choosing him for this. He hoped it'd work in his favor too, an implicit quid pro quo: he'd give Pierce all the answers he wanted, and in return Pierce would do the same.

He had to be honest: even though part of him was champing at the bit, eager for it to be over, it was a very pleasant dinner. The food was delicious, complex and refined and perfectly prepared. The company was as charming as it had been back at Stark's gala. Pierce's gaze was direct and warm, his reactions on point: he was really listening to everything Barnes had to say. Having the attention of such a man centered on him was a heady feeling. Pierce was powerful, and clever, and yes, handsome. He spent his life surrounded by the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most powerful people in the world. Yet here he was tonight, sitting opposite Barnes, listening to him like—well, not like he was all of those things and more, Barnes wasn't conceited enough to believe that. But like he was talented enough, interesting enough, to deserve that attention, to deserve Pierce's trust.

He almost got carried away with it once or twice over the course of the meal, but once the last mouthfuls of dessert had disappeared and the waiter had brought Pierce a glass of brandy as a digestive, he made sure to refocus. When he suggested that now might be the time for him to start asking the questions, Pierce nodded agreeably enough, and so finally they could get going.

Barnes started on the list he'd prepared, with easy generalities at first, and Pierce replied. Or, it seemed like he did, but then his answer prompted him to make a remark off-the-record, or to ask Barnes yet another question, expecting a reply, and before Barnes knew it, his line of enquiry had been detailed entirely. He rallied—but it happened again, and again, and while Pierce's interest was flattering, it wasn't why they were here.

"If things go on like this," he said eventually, his frustration peaking, "I'll start thinking you're not taking this seriously." He said it with a smile, striving to keep his voice light and pleasant, only a mock-scolding—but with an edge to it that he couldn't quite suppress.

Pierce caught it, and sobered. "I apologize," he said. "I must've been more tired than I thought, and it seems the wine has gotten to my head. I won't be much more use tonight, I'm afraid."

"I understand," Barnes said. He tried not to tense, not to let his disappointment show—because he'd worked so hard on this. Yet here Pierce was, behaving like it didn't matter at all, like _Barnes_ didn't matter at all, like he was nothing but a pawn, to be toyed with and discarded at will. But this was how things went with the people on top. And at least, when Barnes suggested, "Maybe we should postpone this until you're better rested, then," Pierce didn't say no. Instead he said, "Of course," and assured, "My office will be in touch," so if tonight had been another test, then at least it seemed to have been one that Barnes had passed.

It was little comfort later on, after he'd gone home, when he listened to the recording of their conversation. Then it became obvious not only how little useable material he'd garnered over the evening, but also how easily Pierce had been able to distract him, to put him off track. Like Barnes _was_ nothing but a stupid greenhorn, the inexperienced and undeserving upstart he knew half the people in the profession still saw him as.

But he had a promise at another shot. That could still be counted as a win—or so he told himself, swallowing through the knot in his throat.

-

Barnes wasn't in the best mood the following morning; which, of course, meant that Grant had to go and step right in it.

"So, how was the date?"

"It wasn't a date," Bucky replied, although his voice wasn't as firm as he would've liked, because he wasn't sure what the evening had been, exactly.

"Oh yeah, right," Grant said, like he was just remembering it now. "You got all the quotes you needed, then?"

Bucky looked up from the papers on his desk and met his gaze. Behind those bloody glasses of his, Grant's blue eyes were as direct as Pierce's had been the previous evening. They were also a lot franker; a lot harsher, too. Like he already knew. Still, Bucky didn't want to admit it. "We didn't have the time to get around to all of it," he said. "I should get a call from his office soon to set up a second meeting."

Grant huffed as he turned back to his computer screen. "Right," he muttered mockingly—and it was the tone, more than anything, that made Bucky snap.

He put down his pen. "What's it to you?" Grant glanced back at him, eyebrows raised. "No, really, what's it to you? What's your problem? You've been weird about this from the start."

"I don't—" Whatever that reflexive reply had been, Grant bit it back. After a few seconds, he shrugged. "I just don't like it is all."

"It's not for you to like or not," Bucky pointed out.

"Come on, Buck," Grant said, and for some reason the use of that nickname made Bucky's hackles rise. "He's obviously stringing you along with the promise of an interview—except that giving you the materials for an article clearly isn't what he's after."

Bucky frowned. "And what might that be, uh? And how would you know?"

Grant pressed his lips together.

"No, really," Bucky insisted, "what are you trying to imply here? Because it sure sounds like you think his interest in me is nowhere near professional."

"I mean," Grant said, which wasn't a _No, you've got it all wrong_. Bucky straightened in his chair. "I can't presume to know for sure what—"

"Yeah, you obviously can't," Bucky interrupted. "Because if you had more than two braincells working right now, you'd see how ludicrous that idea is." Yet he couldn't make himself snort. Instead, a tense line ran along his shoulders, like it had the night previous. "First of all, it'd mean that Secretary Pierce—a Republican who's been in politics for decades, a _married_ man should I remind you, might not only be actually interested in men, but also comfortable enough with it becoming public knowledge to be seen in public, on a date with another man. Like _that_ 's anywhere near likely. And even if that was the case—" Because _damn it_ , Grant hadn't been there, and it hadn't been a date, but it sure had felt like one in the end, hadn't it? "Even if that was the case," Bucky repeated, louder, when it looked like Grant might try and speak, "you're also implying not only that he might be interested in _me_ , but also that _I_ would be willing to—what, play along with it? See if I can get an interview out of it? That I might go all the way while I'm at it and let him fuck me for the sake of a quote?"

"Of course not!" Grant exclaimed, looking outraged.

"Then what?" Distantly, Bucky realized that he might’ve been taking this too far. But Grant's skepticism stung, all the more because Bucky couldn't easily refute it; and he'd always been terrible at not striking back. " _Obviously_ it isn't that. So is it really that hard to believe he might've approached me because he knows my work, and he's been expected to give an interview for _years_ , and he chose me because I'm a professional and I show promise and he can trust me to do him justice? Somehow him wanting to fuck me is more realistic than that?" Except that Bucky getting the right idea about Secretary Pierce hadn't seemed to be high on the man’s list of priorities the night before, had it?

"I know you do good work," Grant said, "that's not what I—"

"Then I ask you again, what the _fuck_ is your problem?" Bucky snapped. "Because I don't see what it could be, unless you're just jealous you weren't the one he chose."

An expression flashed over Grant's face, there and gone in the blink of an eye, but Bucky had seen it. He'd _seen_ it, and no matter how much Grant tried to school his features afterwards, it didn't erase it, didn't mean that it had not been there. Bucky had to sit back in his chair.

"Wow." He felt stunned. " _Wow_ , you _are_. _That's_ what this is about, this is all—" He let out a laugh. It wasn't pretty. "This is all because he chose _me_ and never looked at you twice. Wow."

He had to get away from here. He pushed back from his desk, ready to stand up.

"Buck—"

" _That's Barnes to you_ ," Barnes snarled.

O'Connor jerked back at his tone.

Barnes stared at him for a second and couldn't help but say, "You know, I can't even believe it. Something like this, coming from you. _You_ , of all people, prancing around and pretending an interview like this one might be something you've _earned_ —when we all know how you got this job in the first place."

"I'm not—" O'Connor said haltingly. "That's not what this is."

"Then what the _fuck_ is it?" Barnes exploded, slamming his hands on his desk. This time it was loud enough for the people around them to take notice, to glance over. They'd all been going on with their business, because there was nothing unusual about Barnes and O'Connor bickering about work—but now it was becoming obvious that this wasn't bickering, and this wasn't about work.

"I—" O'Connor said, only to stop like the words had gotten stuck in his throat. His eyes darted around, quickly, as if suddenly he too had become aware of the people around them, pretending not to listen, pretending not to watch. As he did, something passed over his features, there and gone like a wave. If Barnes didn't know any better, he would've said that it was fear. Of what? Of his secret being out? Whatever it was, O'Connor pushed it down and said, "I just have a bad feeling about this guy."

Barnes blinked incredulously. "You have a 'bad feeling'. About the Secretary of State." He straightened up. "The guy who declined a Peace Nobel Prize because he believed he hadn't done enough to earn it." He stepped back from the desk.

"Buck—" O'Connor tried again.

"Save it." With those words, Barnes snatched his coat, turned away, and left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... Sorry? ^^"
> 
> As always, comments are more than welcome. Next chapter on Thursday!


	5. Chapter 5

"So, Mendez," Barnes said, leaning against her desk. It was after lunch, which Barnes had eaten on his own at a deli somewhere after spending the whole morning out of the office trying to calm down, to clear his head, to make himself able to come back and not _kill O'Connor on sight_.

It hadn't worked.

"Elle struck down your last idea for a piece, so would you like to jump on that article O'Connor and I have been working on instead?" he asked. "I'm really swamped right now, you'd be doing me a solid."

Instead of considering, Mendez' expression turned bleak. "So it's true then?"

"What?" Barnes asked, not letting go of his slapped-on smile.

Mendez shook her head. "I hate it when Mom and Dad fight."

Barnes pretended he had no idea what she meant. "Will you do it?"

Mendez hesitated, then sighed. "If Elle agrees."

Elle, of course, did not agree. There would've been little chance of her doing so on a good day, and today Barnes had left the office mere minutes after he'd first arrived with no explanation and nothing to show for it upon his return.

So he was stuck working with O'Connor, which was just peachy, really.

-

The thing was, O'Connor did seem sorry. Over the next few days, he tried more than once to start a conversation, to apologize maybe. But Barnes, still furious, still raw from what had been said, wasn't having it. Eventually, O'Connor got tired of reaching out and being snapped at. Faced with yet another harsh rebuttal, he clenched his jaw and straightened his shoulders, a look of resolve coming over his face. For a second, Barnes thought that he was getting ready to start another row, a worse one. Barnes was ready for it, almost eager, just waiting for an occasion to get it all out, to let O'Connor know exactly what he thought of him, to return the favor of O'Connor's accidental honesty.

But O'Connor didn't start a fight. Instead he went back to his desk and buried himself into his work.

Things settled, after that. Their partnership became one of stiff politeness and cold distance, giving Barnes all the space he'd wanted. It should've felt great.

It didn't.

Hanukkah then Christmas came and went, and things didn't improve. They both got their work done, sure, but not in a way that came anywhere close to a real collaboration. All errands and interviews, all lead investigations were done separately, with nothing but a brief exchange beforehand to divide up the tasks and a quick report given in the wake of them. Not out loud. Conversations were kept to a minimum. Most communication happened via stilted emails. If they had something to show each other, a source or a set of data or a draft that needed to be looked over, it came as an attachment—instead of being printed and handed over their desks, discussed aloud and annotated in pens of various colors, their handwriting intermingling.

As the new year dawned, Barnes finally admitted it to himself: he missed it. He missed the easy camaraderie they'd developed, missed their bickering, missed O'Connor waiting for him in the morning with a cup of coffee and a quip. He missed O'Connor crowding in close to look at documents over his shoulder, giving advice when Barnes asked for it and when he didn't, sprawling in the chair beside Barnes’ desk and kicking said desk to send Barnes’ pens rolling onto the floor, never caring that Barnes retaliated by throwing all of them at him as he picked them up. Barnes missed his partner, plain and simple. Which was absurd: the man was sitting right there, at the desk opposite his. And he wasn't, because obviously the person Barnes was missing had never even existed in the first place.

Once or twice, Barnes thought about giving in. He was aware that he'd flown off the handle himself that day, and he was tempted to admit it, to hear the apology O'Connor was so obviously eager to give. But then he remembered what O'Connor had said. What he'd implied, where all that had come from: what he really thought deep down. Barnes didn't know which was worse, O'Connor believing that he was better than Barnes, more deserving than Barnes, or O'Connor refusing to admit that, no matter how highly he thought of himself, Barnes might still have enough merit for someone like Pierce to pick him instead. Both were linked, of course. And it didn't matter that O'Connor hadn't meant to imply that Barnes would be ready to whore himself out for a piece. That he considered Barnes so far beneath him was enough.

Not that Barnes should care. He'd known what O'Connor was from the start: an opportunist and a fraud. It was Barnes' fault, really, for forgetting it, for giving O'Connor the benefit of the doubt, for letting himself be fooled. Well, no more. Now, his eyes had opened again. Now, he remembered. O'Connor was nothing but a conceited liar—and not even a good one. He was an asshole who vainly thought himself above everyone else, who judged Barnes for his ambitions and for what he might be willing to do for them, whereas _he_ was the one undeserving of the position he had, the one who'd obtained it through sexual favors.

That was where Barnes' thoughts ended every time he started envisioning a possible reconciliation, leading him to the renewed determination to stay firm in his resentment. He couldn't allow for O'Connor to fool him twice—hurt him twice. Not that he should've been able to do it in the first place. So Barnes didn't have O'Connor's respect, so what? The man's opinions weren't worth a damn. Why should Barnes care about them? He never cared about what people thought, not even the members of the profession who actually had the credentials to back their judgment. O'Connor definitely didn't.

-

Maybe Barnes would've been more lenient if he'd made some headway with his interview, and thus obtained solid proof that O'Connor's insulting doubts were unfounded. But he never heard from the Secretary's office. When he called right after Christmas, two weeks after their failed interview, he was told that Secretary Pierce was extremely busy right now in D.C., with the holidays and their share of ceremonies and the turn of the year. Barnes would have to wait. They'd contact him again at a later date, once things had quieted down.

It wasn't quite a dismissal; but it definitely wasn't a win.

-

In these difficult times, scouring the internet for clues on Nomad and Falcon proved to be a welcome distraction. Even with the many fictional stories that kept cropping up about them. Or _especially_ with them.

> **Back unto the Breach** (Nomad/Falcon, 65k, 10/10, Complete, Mature)
> 
> _Zach is doing alright, living the best life he can after his discharge, calling his mom every week in between teaching self-defense classes and studying at night to get his nursing license, not even minding the occasional nightmare._
> 
> _Then a wounded Nomad crashes on his fire escape._
> 
> _Or: The Falcon origin story no one asked for_.
> 
> Tags: Nomad/Falcon, Migratory Birds, Origin Story, Superheroes, Vigilantes, Graphic Depiction of Violence, Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder - PTSD, Hurt/Comfort, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Getting Together, Nomad's Secret Caravan

Barnes stared and muttered, "Fuck it." He clicked on the link.

After all, reading about a partnership that _worked_ instead of going up in flames again would make for a nice change.

-

Secretary Pierce's office did call him back, eventually. It took two months.

In the meantime, not much had changed. Barnes and O'Connor worked at a steady rhythm shrouded in courtesy as glacial as the weather outside. The rest of the office was distinctly uncomfortable about it, but if Barnes and O'Connor could deal with it, then they all could too. At least, they’d gotten the implicit message and stayed well out of it, even Urich. As for Elle, since they were both behaving like adults and handing in decent enough articles on time, she didn't get to say or do anything.

The problem Barnes should've foreseen was that nobody could ever say that Elle Richmond didn't get to say or do something about something and be right.

She was obviously aware that broaching the topic with either of them wouldn't solve anything, at least not on Barnes' side of it. So she decided to force the issue another way: she assigned them an intern, starting on the Monday following New Year.

"Hi, I'm Peter," the kid said, voice high and wavering as he stood there, very straight and very tense in a cheap suit that, on him, looked like nothing more than a bad Halloween costume. "Parker," he added belatedly.

If Barnes had glimpsed him in the street, he would've pegged him for a middle-schooler, and that wasn't just because he was terrible at guessing the ages of children. One would've been generous saying that this kid looked fourteen. Yet he was a sophomore in high school, with big dreams of becoming a photojournalist. The year before, he'd won some award for an admittedly impressive picture of Spiderman swinging between buildings. For some reason that had caught Tony Stark's attention and, long story short, the boy had gotten a glowing letter of recommendation that had fast-tracked his application for an internship at the _Bulletin_.

Apparently, it hadn't been enough for Stark to shove _one_ asshole down their throats.

Parker wasn't an asshole, though. He was just a kid. It wasn't his fault that things had turned out this way, unless one considered it his fault to have a hobby and a dream, or to get recognition for them, or to take a chance when Tony fucking Stark offered it. Elle had no pity and no qualms about throwing him to the wolves, but Barnes wasn't actually one—or, if he was, he wasn't the kind that bit those who didn't deserve it. Peter didn't. Sure, he was awkward, he made mistakes, and Barnes could've done without the extra workload that came with guiding his steps at the journal—surely Urich or Anderson would've been better suited for that. But he wouldn't take it out on the kid.

Especially since the kid wouldn't have been able to take it without crumbling. He was a nervous wreck half the time. What’s more, he seemed to be absolutely terrified of O'Connor. Terrified or star-struck, the way only teenagers could be. Except that usually they behaved that way around an actor, a singer—or, for the rare nerds, a scientist or a political figure. Not some journalist who, while he did passable work, hadn't achieved anything of note yet. O'Connor hadn't uncovered any huge scandal, he hadn't taken the kind of stances that unleashed debate or brought one to TV sets, he hadn't even made an in-depth report on an as yet untold example of human misery. Yet here Parker was, following O'Connor around like a puppy, but startling and squeaking whenever O'Connor simply glanced over at him.

What made it all the more confounding was that, as far as Barnes could tell, O'Connor was good to the kid. He and O'Connor still weren't anywhere near speaking terms, but Barnes wasn't _blind_. O'Connor did a more than fair job as a supervisor, much better than Barnes himself. He found tasks for Parker to accomplish, easy ones that grew in complexity as weeks went by. He took the time to explain if there was a tricky part to them, checked in with Parker later on, discussed his progress. He sent him to other colleagues and other teams so that the kid could observe how different sections of the newspaper worked, and listened to his remarks about it afterwards. He took Parker with him when he went on an errand, giving him a chance to make use of his camera, and even sat with him afterwards to go over the results, debating why this or that shot would be a better choice to go with an article—and not 'debating' the way he and Barnes would've done it. Barnes had thought O'Connor only had two modes, behaving like a complete asshole and trying—failing—to pretend that he wasn't a complete asshole. Obviously, he'd been mistaken, because O'Connor definitely wasn't an asshole to Parker, and he definitely wasn't pretending. Being around the kid seemed to soften his edges, and when they fell deep into conversation Parker forgot to be nervous, could even become quite animated and assertive. But then inevitably the talk would come to an end, and Parker would look up, and remember…whatever it was that gave him that wide-eyed look.

Like that one time, after they'd settled on one of Parker's pictures and O'Connor said, "Send it to the editors," and Parker did something disturbingly close to snapping his heels together before blurting, "Yes, Mr. Am— I mean, Cap. Tain. Mr. Captain. Sir."

With every word he grew redder, until finally he managed to stop talking, closing his eyes and breathing out with a look of utter mortification on his face. _Someone kill me now_ , it said, but no one did, and when he re-opened his eyes O'Connor was still there, holding out the picture and film with a faintly quirked eyebrow. The kid took them, actually bowed his head, and booked it.

Barnes watched him go bemusedly.

"Do you have a secret army past you didn't tell us about," he couldn't help but ask, "or did you make one up just to fuck with him?"

O'Connor looked surprised at being spoken to. "I didn't—" he started, then stopped and shook his head. "It's just, he thinks I look like Captain America."

Barnes raised his eyebrows incredulously—and paused. "You do, actually," he said, looking O'Connor up and down. Take away the glasses, and in between the blond hair with its old-fashioned haircut, the blue eyes, the square jaw, and the broad shoulders… Barnes opened his mouth to ask, _Ever considered a career in cinema?_ , but even as the teasing words crowded the tip of his tongue, he realized what he was doing, and stopped. This kind of bantering wasn't something they did anymore, he remembered. O'Connor did too, his faint smile fading.

Barnes refused to let that make him feel bad and looked away.

He resumed his work—or tried to, but the short exchange had left him unbalanced. Before he knew it, he was glancing back up at O'Connor. His partner didn't notice: he was too busy frowning down at whatever he was seeing on his laptop. Suddenly, Barnes was struck by how drawn he looked, how tense, his brow furrowed, his jaw clenched in a way that was all the more obvious after it had briefly relaxed in the wake of Barnes’ slip-up. Now it was back in full-force—and it was there to stay.

Over the next few days, Barnes noticed it again and again. It only lifted somewhat when O'Connor was talking to Parker and making an obvious effort to look, if not nice, at least neutral and patient and open. The rest of the time—most of the time, given that Parker was only with them for two afternoons a week—his face closed right back down.

Barnes got the distinct impression that this wasn’t a result of their fight. That expression, on O'Connor's face? That didn't look like guilt. It looked preoccupied. Somber. And, at times, almost angry.

He was working a lot. More than Barnes, even: he was always already there when Barnes arrived in the morning and was always still there at night when Barnes left. In between he spent the day in and out of the office, chasing what seemed to be an excessive amount of leads. It shouldn't have been anything out of the ordinary. Everyone at the _Bulletin_ worked a lot; O'Connor was no exception. He had the topics he worked on with Barnes, a few more he investigated with other colleagues, plus some minor ones that he dealt with on his own—and yet all of them combined didn't seem like enough to account for the hours he spent at his desk, reading page after page of small print, digging through databases and archives, comparing notes, or typing on his laptop—a new device Barnes had never seen before, some futuristic thing that didn't even have a logo and whose screen was constantly covered in code, be it computer code or coded text, because it turned out that O'Connor could cipher a sentence even as he wrote it. It all pointed at him working on something he didn't want anyone else to see or understand; something that made him look like _that_ , like every day another piece of the world was coming to weigh down on his shoulders.

And Barnes, who knew how invested O'Connor could get in a story, how unable he was to hold himself back and keep at least part of himself safe, Barnes wanted to ask, _What is it?_ He wanted to say, _Tell me what it is, let me take it, I'll bear it with you_.

But he didn't, because they didn't do that anymore either.

-

Preoccupation with his colleague was still nagging at Barnes' mind a few days later as he distractedly scrolled through the internet, checking the latest updates on the superhero blogosphere. By now it had become clear that Falcon was here to stay, both solo and as Nomad's partner. It even looked like he was becoming the more popular of the two. He still evaded the cops with laughable ease, and surprisingly the army was leaving him alone. The internal investigations launched after his first public appearance had all been buried, Barnes had learned—but he hadn't been able to find out how or why.

The consequence was that, on the forums and blogs, the main cause of tension had become a petty one. Some fans claimed that Nomad was the one true New York superhero—no mention of Daredevil—and accused the others of being disloyal and throwing themselves at Falcon just because he was shiny and new. Some went further and tried to argue that Falcon was and always would be inferior, in ways that unmistakably reeked of racism. The voices rising in defense of the newcomer were louder and more numerous, though, enthused by his ability to fly, his smile, his ease with people, his obvious knowledge of emergency medicine—when it wasn't his forearms, or his chest, or his ass. Last but not least, a small but fervent number kept pleading for everyone to get along, because wasn't it great that Nomad didn't have to fight evil on his own anymore? Superheroing had to be hard, everyone should've been glad that they both had someone to watch their backs and patch them up if they got hurt.

Barnes thought that this was a reasonable stance to take. Or he would have, if the same people hadn’t turned right around to start squabbling over the even pettier matter of what the two heroes' partnership should be called. A simply hyphenated Nomad-Falcon, or Falcon-Nomad? Or a portmanteau—Nomcon? Falmad?

None of these options seemed to be winning out, despite the detailed argumentations some had written in favor of one or the other. Barnes was skimming one of those, half-wondering what the fuck he was reading and why he even bothered with it all, when his phone rang. It was Becca.

They exchanged the usual greetings and pleasantries, then Becca paused like she did when she knew that Bucky had something to tell her, and she knew that he knew that she knew. Except that this time, Bucky didn't. He remained silent.

"So," Becca finally said, her tone letting him know that she was on to him. "O'Connor. You never told me he was that tall. Or blond. Or jacked."

That wasn't what Bucky had expected to hear. "What?"

"What, what?"

"You've met O'Connor?" He could feel himself start frowning.

"Well, yes, he took me out to lunch today," she said, like it should've been obvious.

It wasn't. "Lunch?"

"Yeah, to talk about that piece you're apparently doing on my boss? Thanks for the complete lack of warning, by the way. Couldn't you have found a better way to let me know about it than have your partner show up out of the blue to discuss it?"

"What?"

"He was damn lucky he caught me on the only day this week where I was free."

Bucky was still struggling to keep up. "O'Connor. Took you out. To lunch," he said slowly.

"Yeah, like I said, to—" She paused. "Wait, you didn't know?"

"I—" Bucky recalibrated quickly. He hadn't told Becca about the latest turn his relationship with O'Connor had taken, not over Hanukkah and not on New Year's Eve, not even when both she and their parents had remarked on how badly the winter seemed to be affecting him this year. Just like he hadn't told her about Pierce. He hadn't wanted to, not until the interview was a sure thing.

He didn't let himself linger on what his reasons for not telling her might've been. "We'd discussed it as an option," he said instead, "but I didn't think he'd actually go through with it. Because—"

"Yeah, him being the one to ask the questions instead of you doesn't erase the whole conflict of interests thing. Or the concept of state secrecy. Or the need for professional discretion."

"I'm sorry if he put you in an uncomfortable position," Bucky said, and this time he was entirely honest.

"That's not what I meant," Becca reassured him, "more like, there wasn't much I could tell him, so I'm not sure the trip was worth it. Although to be honest he had questions I would never have expected—and I can't for the life of me see what you'd need to know those things for. What angle are you going for? It can't possibly be a portrait."

"It's a work in progress," Bucky hedged. "I'm still keeping several options open."

"Okay. Well, I hope I could help clear some things up."

"I'm sure you did."

"I gather you haven't had the time to debrief, then."

"No, I was out of the office all day." Except that he hadn't been. He'd been right there, at his desk, and he'd definitely noticed O'Connor's prolonged absence: he'd only shown up at the very end of the afternoon, right as it was turning into evening. Half their colleagues had already left by then. At the time, Barnes had suspected a combination of lead chasing and a visit to Ms. Rushman, but apparently that wasn't it. Apparently, O'Connor had actually been travelling all the way down to D.C. to get all up in Becca's business. Bucky gritted his teeth but didn't let it show in his voice. "You know how it is."

Becca snorted. "Tell me about it."

-

"What the fuck kind of game do you think you're playing?"

As he loomed over O'Connor's desk, part of Barnes was distantly glad that today wasn't one of the days when Parker was around, because the poor kid was traumatized enough as it was without witnessing a confrontation between his supervisors. Especially given that O'Connor took his sweet time looking away from his screen—where some sort of algorithm was running—before raising his eyebrows and asking, "What's this about?" like he didn't _know_.

Barnes had no problem reminding him. "My sister," he said. "My fucking sister! More specifically, you taking her out to lunch behind my back."

"It wasn't really behind your back, since you know all about it," O'Connor pointed out. "Besides—" He picked something up and held it out: a USB stick. "—our whole conversation is on here, if you want to hear it."

"I don't want your fucking recording!" Barnes snarled, slapping O'Connor's hand away. The stick escaped and slid along the desk until it fell off. "I want you to stay the hell away from my family. I mean, what the fuck is your play here? What did you even want with her?" O'Connor opened his mouth. "And don't fucking try and bullshit me about how you were trying to help me with my article."

O'Connor closed his mouth. His lips tightened. "I needed some information for one of the stories I'm working on," he admitted. "Things only a person from the State Department could confirm."

The man really was a shit liar. "Yeah?" Barnes asked. The phone on his desk started ringing, but he didn't let that distract him. "Why didn't you tell her that, then?"

If O'Connor had tried to use his connection to Barnes to try and get classified information from his sister to push himself forward, not caring that it might compromise her…

But O'Connor remained stubbornly silent, either because he didn't have an answer or because he didn't want to give it. Meanwhile, Barnes' phone was still ringing—which it never did, unless it was for a good reason.

"This isn't over," Barnes said as he straightened up to round the desk and pick up. As he did, something pinged on whatever program was running on O'Connor's laptop, catching the man's attention. By then Barnes was on the other side of the screen though, and he couldn't see what it was.

He brought the phone to his ear—and was suddenly glad that he hadn't let his pride get the better of him and prevent him from answering: the call was from Pierce's office, calling him back regarding the interview. The Secretary of State was going to be in New York and, having remembered Barnes, might just have the time to squeeze him in into his busy schedule.

Less than five minutes later, Barnes had an appointment for the middle of the following week—with an apology for the short notice, but it wasn't like he minded—and a more indulgent disposition.

"So, looks like I may need that recording, after all," he told O'Connor, a self-satisfied smile stretching his lips.

It faded, though, because O'Connor didn't glance at him, or frown, or react at all. It was like hadn't heard Barnes at all. He was looking—staring, really—at his screen, with his lips parted and a look on his face that was a mixture of incredulity and horror. Or was that fury?

"Hey," Barnes called out, kicking his desk none too gently, so that both the tremor and the sound would be impossible to ignore. O'Connor startled, swinging that wide-eyed look towards Barnes, and—and all of a sudden Barnes realized how much of a mess O'Connor was today. He had dark circles under his eyes and was in dire need of a shave. His obviously unwashed hair was sticking up in tufts like he'd spent the whole morning tugging at it. His tie was loose and askew, yet it was nowhere as wrinkled as his shirt—and actually, weren't these the same clothes as the ones he'd been wearing yesterday?

_What the fuck_ , Barnes prepared to say, but O'Connor beat him to it. "I gotta go," he said, and looked almost surprised to hear himself speak. A second later he was out of his chair, snapping his laptop shut and shoving it into his bag—it hadn't been connected to anything—along with several piles of documents, snatching his coat and turning to leave.

"Wait a minute," Barnes said, standing up and reaching out as O'Connor walked past, "I told you we weren't—"

His hand brushed against O'Connor's arm, but couldn't grip it: O'Connor jerked away violently. Both froze. Then O'Connor repeated, "I gotta go," this time sounding almost apologetic, and went.

-

O'Connor stayed gone for the rest of that Friday. Once Barnes realized that his partner wouldn't be coming back he made his way home, but not before retrieving the USB stick from where it had fallen between their desks.

He listened to the recording sitting sideways on his couch with Alpine on his lap. A few minutes in, he could see what Becca had meant. There was no rhyme or reason to O'Connor's questions. They swung from the general and expected to the disturbingly precise and incongruous, and back. What was it like, working under Alexander G. Pierce? Had Becca already been part of the State Department in 2009? If so, could she remember what part the institution and its directors had played in the decision process that had led to the deployment of U.S. missiles in Yemen in December of that year, and to the subsequent death of 55 civilians? Did she know who exactly had been in charge of the case? What was the State Department's official stance on Russia's attempts to undermine the Eastern Partnership initiative between the EU and its Eastern neighbors? Was the relationship between her colleagues at the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs and the Secretary of State good? And so on.

Barnes had no idea where O'Connor was going with these questions. None of the topics the man was currently working on, be it in partnership with Barnes or on his own, would call for any of them. Even for Barnes' interview, most of them were useless. Rather, Barnes got the distinct impression that something else entirely was going on underneath the veneer of a cross between interview and pleasant conversation. That with half the questions he asked, O'Connor wasn't so much after the answer itself as he was after what Becca betrayed in her reaction to them, in her choice of words, even in her refusal to answer them, or in her declaring herself unable to, which she did more than once. He also deftly evaded her own questions when she wondered aloud why he'd even need to know this or that—half the time blaming it on Barnes' himself, the asshole. But the strategy was efficient, since Becca mostly accepted that flimsy excuse with nothing but a laugh.

It was disquieting. O'Connor was usually a disaster when it came to interviews. But this did not feel like one, not quite. Instead it sounded like a skillfully veiled interrogation, and at that he was turning out to be frighteningly good.

Barnes was ready to confront him about it on Monday, for Becca's sake but also because he couldn't for the life of him figure out what O'Connor's purpose had been, and if he'd fulfilled it in the end. But O'Connor never showed.

"Where’s your partner?" Elle asked pointedly, because Monday mornings meant a meeting, and one did not miss that meeting unless one had an iron-clad excuse and Elle had been duly informed in advance. Obviously, this time, she hadn't been.

"I don't know," Barnes said, seething. It was one thing to disappear with no warning and no information about where one was going or when one would be back. It was another to do that and leave one's partner alone to deal with Elle, who expected partners to always be able to account for each other's whereabouts and was…displeased when they weren't.

"Well, find out," she said with a warning look in her eyes.

"Oh, I will," Barnes said. "And when I do, I'll send him straight to you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments as welcome as ever! Next chapter on Saturday :)


	6. Chapter 6

Fervent as it had been, Barnes' promise to Elle soon proved to have been a lie.

Night had long since fallen, and Barnes had just turned off his bedside lamp and settled down to sleep when his doorbell rang. He was so unused to it—he only rarely got visitors, after all—that for a moment he thought that he'd imagined it. But it came again, followed by a knock.

Frowning, he sat up, and hissed when he was hit by the cold air of the room. Many colorful curses were uttered as he clambered out of bed and quickly snatched his velvet robe. By the time he reached his front door, he'd slipped into it and was tightening the belt around his waist.

Given that this was New York and he wasn't a suicidal idiot, he looked through the peephole first—and could hardly believe what he saw. But he wasn't mistaken: when he unlocked and opened the door O'Connor was still standing there, clutching his messenger bag to his chest and looking worse for wear.

"What the fucking fuck?" Barnes asked, as any reasonable person would.

"I'm sorry," O'Connor had the unexpected decency to say. "I didn't know where else to go."

Barnes quickly calculated the pros and cons of slamming the door in his face versus getting the explanations he'd be owed if he helped, and stepped back to let him in. As soon as O'Connor was inside, he closed and locked the door again.

When he turned around, O'Connor had already made himself at home: he'd taken off his scarf and coat and draped them over the back of the couch, on which he'd sat without even asking. It ticked Barnes off, but not as much as it could have, because O'Connor couldn't have been less at ease. He sat straight, his body tense, his hands clinging to the bag on his lap. His eyes were wide, nervous and hesitant like he knew that Barnes could kick him out any second. Barnes had no intention of dispelling that fear.

"So," he said, crossing his arms, "what the fuck is going on?"

Despite his reasoning when he'd let O'Connor in, he half expected to hear something about a flooding due to burst pipes, or about Ms. Rushman finally dumping him, which would've accounted for both his harrowed look and the fact that he was here instead of at hers. But all O'Connor did was open his bag and take out a thick file, which he held for a second before he said, "Remember when I said I had a bad feeling about Pierce?"

_Oh_ , Barnes thought, _so that's what this is_. The row he'd known was coming for the past couple of months, brewing quietly under the lid of their cold silence and distance. Somehow, he wasn't as eager for it as he'd once been.

When Barnes didn't answer, O'Connor looked up. Whatever he saw on Barnes' face made his expression falter. "No, I don't—I'm not here to fight," he said. "I just—I need—" He huffed, clearly irritated by his inarticulacy, and held out the file. "Here. Read this." After a beat, he added, "Please."

Barnes stared at him for a few more seconds, his mouth slightly pursed and his eyebrows quirked to fully display his skepticism and impatience. O'Connor's entreating look didn't abate. If possible, it even deepened, and so eventually Barnes unfolded his arms and crossed the few steps separating him from the couch to take the folder.

He opened it and started leafing through its contents. It was completely disjointed: separate documents, memos, reports, newspaper clippings, photographs, and maps, with only a few sheets of paper here and there with notes that O'Connor had handwritten himself but which didn't help Barnes much.

"What the fuck am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Just read it all," O'Connor said. "Please."

Barnes frowned at him for a few seconds longer. It was pretty out-of-character for O'Connor to be so polite, so willing to beg—enough that Barnes felt compelled to do as asked. Whatever this was about, it had to be something big.

He walked over and sat down at the other end of the couch before looking back down at the file, looking deeper, trying to make heads or tails of it. He knew how O'Connor's mind worked. Calling on that, he tried to figure out which documents were connected to each other and how, in what order the information should be placed, how O'Connor's notes came into it.

Little by little, his frown deepened; his movements from one document to the next slowed; he started flipping forward and back, checking, comparing.

A picture was emerging. It wasn't a pretty one.

"Fuck," he said. For a second, he thought—hoped—that he was getting this wrong. But when he glanced up, the look on O'Connor's face told him that he could only be right. "How the fuck did you— Where the fuck did you even _get_ all this?" Because some of those pictures and memos definitely weren't the kind which would be made freely available to _anyone_ from the public.

"I—" O'Connor said, and stopped there for a second. "I have my ways."

Barnes glared at him. "Yeah, I'm gonna need something better than that."

O'Connor pressed his lips together but finally, haltingly admitted, "Tony might've. Given me some…experimental devices."

"Experimental? How about _illegal_ —fucking hell, they made it possible for you to hack the fucking _State Department_. Some army databases, too, I’m guessing. This could—" He glanced back down at the file. "This could get you arrested."

That was the wrong thing to say. Or maybe the right one: from spooked and nervous, O'Connor switched straight to furious. "I don't care," he hissed. "I'm glad I did it. Because _now_ I know. _We_ know."

"Know what?" Barnes asked, more of a challenge to spell it out than anything.

Isolated, the events referred to in the documents and the ensuing reactions and decisions didn't stick out much. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Just a situation that had quickly escalated; a charismatic leader abruptly disappearing; a mistake made due to insufficient intelligence; the wrong strategy adopted to deal with a crisis; a freak accident; and so on. Put side by side, though, and supplemented with data on the chronology of events, the chains of responsibility, the channels of communications, they started telling a different story. One that couldn't quite be put down to the unpredictability of life or to sheer incompetency. One that spoke—reluctant as Barnes was to admit it, since it reeked of paranoia—of intent. Of careful yet systematic endeavors towards destabilization, not only in the US but in the rest of the world.

It took the form of terrible choices that contradicted what available intel would’ve dictated. Of decisive action taken when there had been no need, whereas other situations had been left to deteriorate when an intervention would've been salutary. Of people being promoted to another service when their credentials didn't warrant it or removed from a position with no explanation: pieces moved on a vast invisible chessboard, every time to disastrous consequences. Each and every one of those came like a step of a meticulous process that stretched over years and years, over decades even, over several countries and continents. A process perpetuated by countless people, collaborators that had to have infiltrated the highest spheres of government and intelligence. A network. A conspiracy. For—Barnes could only guess what for: power, money, influence. Control.

And at the center of it all, right now, was Pierce.

That's what Barnes expected to hear from O'Connor. But instead what O'Connor said—spat—was, "Hydra."

Barnes paused. "What?"

"It's Hydra. The network, the plan, the—" He rubbed at his face with both hands, almost dislodging his glasses, and repeated, "It's _fucking_ Hydra."

"Hydra as in, that cultist offshoot of the scientific branch of the SS?" Barnes asked slowly, carefully. He'd always been leery of conspiracy theories and wasn't sure what to make of his partner not only coming up with one, but coming up with _that_ one. Undeniably something was going on, and Pierce was involved. But… _Hydra_? "The one that was taken down by Captain America back during World War II?"

" _Supposedly_."

Barnes watched O’Connor for a second, watched the look on his face, a mixture of rage and despair, and decided to play along. "What makes you so sure it's them?"

"Because I fucking _know_ how they work," O'Connor snarled, which wasn't very conclusive for Barnes. "How they fucking _think_. How they—"

"I had no idea the Amish were so diligent about teaching their kids 20th century history," Barnes cut in wryly.

O'Connor sent him a disquieting grin. "It wasn't the Amish."

"… Yeah," Barnes said, unsettled. "I bet it was all you in your wild youth, going around looking for Nazis to punch and making sure you could properly identify them."

"I did punch a lot of Nazis," O'Connor said, and somehow he was relaxing, his smile turning more genuine, if no less ferocious. "Blew up a lot of things too."

Barnes’ returning smile was more hesitant. He'd always assumed that O'Connor had broken with whatever secluded community he'd grown up in because he'd stopped agreeing with their antiquated views, but now it was starting to sound like they might've _had_ to kick him out of self-preservation, because he'd been a hooligan. That, or whatever cult he'd escaped from had been Hydra-inspired. Which wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility—this was America, after all—and would explain O'Connor's self-proclaimed expertise on the subject, but was also…not something Barnes, as a Jewish gay man, would be happy to know for sure existed.

He didn't ask. Instead he chose to focus on the situation, on the practical. "If this is really what you think it is, we need more information," he said. Whether something like Hydra was involved or not—and Barnes would be very much willing to bet that it wasn't—there was still something afoot. Something worryingly serious. Something that they had to uncover before it could reach its end, whatever that was. "We need more proof. This is circumstantial evidence at best."

"I know," O'Connor said. He sounded both unhappy about it and unsurprised.

Barnes dropped the file on the coffee table and turned to him, elbows propped on his knees, hands interlaced between them. "Okay, what leads have you explored? You've hacked into the State Department's servers, what else—" He paused. "Wait, Becca. That's why you went to talk to her."

O'Connor hesitated. "Yes."

"You don't think she's in on it, do you?"

"No," O'Connor replied at once, "no, I don't think so—or, if she is, then she's amazingly good at hiding it. But—I mean." He met Barnes' gaze. "You know her better than I do."

"Damn right I do," Barnes growled. "So don't you go around thinking she'd get herself mixed up with…with some _Nazis_. We're Jewish, for fuck's sake."

Both his grandparents on his mother's side were from Germany. Their families had actually met on the boat to the U.S., back in 1935: two kinds of people for whom the Nuremberg laws had been the last straw. His grandparents had been children back then, and at first… His bubbe had loved to tell the tale: how her mame and granddad's mame had bumped into each other and started talking and become fast friends in the space of that week, how they'd told their children to just go and play together, except that Barnes’ bubbe had had no wish to play with some dumb _boy_. She'd had no idea that this very boy would wind up becoming her husband fifteen years down the road.

The way she'd told it, this was nothing but a cute story with a happy ending. She'd never lingered on its context, its background: what turned out to have been a lucky escape. Just like she'd never talked about the cousins who'd stayed and ended up trapped, even though Barnes’ Ma had told him that there had been several, none of whom had come out of the war alive.

O'Connor didn't say anything—he probably realized there was nothing worth saying. He just waited while Barnes pushed it all down and brought his mind back to the matter at hand. "What else did you do?" Barnes asked.

O'Connor told him. He explained how he'd hacked into the State Department, what he'd been looking for, whom he'd targeted, how Becca's testimony had come into it. How he'd identified a few people he suspected were part of the network, some of them close to Pierce, some of them apparently nothing more than passing acquaintances. How he'd investigated them, with varying results. How he had indeed poked at some military databases but known he couldn't go too deep: even with Stark's devices, he would've been spotted sooner rather than later. How he'd checked out several locations, only to find them deserted, or still active but too well-equipped, too well-manned, to try and break in.

One of them was none other than the Triskelion, the American headquarters of S.H.I.E.L.D., which he believed was one of the main hubs of the network: a lot of his leads pointed towards it. But the building was inaccessible without clearance, and O'Connor hadn't been able to hack into anything there. "There’s some sort of shifting firewall I can't seem to get past," he said, frustration coursing through his voice. "Maybe an A.I."

Barnes knew for a fact that there was no A.I. technology available that was advanced enough to react and adapt to threats in such a way, not even amongst Stark Industries products. At least not officially. Unofficially… He didn't know much about S.H.I.E.L.D., or the level of technology they worked with. He couldn't entirely dismiss the possibility.

Which didn't help him get over the impression that they might be in over their heads already, Nazis or no Nazis.

It also meant that the Triskelion was nothing but another dead end—and apart from it, O'Connor had been running out of options. His next few leads hadn't turned up anything useful. He hadn't known what to do.

So here he was.

He didn't say it, but Barnes heard it all the same, clear as day: he hadn't known what to do, what his next move should be or even could be, and so he'd come here. To Barnes. Trusting that Barnes would help, that he would have ideas, that he would _know_. Like in the end, he _did_ believe in Barnes' experience, in his smarts, in his abilities, even when—especially when—his own failed him.

Barnes didn't know what to feel when he realized that. Something came loose in his chest, making his stomach swoop, leaving him almost breathless.

He swallowed. "Okay, first things first. We need more manpower."

"We can't tell the people at the office," Grant said at once. "It would put them in danger."

"It would. But that's part of the job, we all know that."

"Not at this level."

Barnes had to concede that. Even now, they didn't know how deep the network went, how its members would react once they noticed people sniffing around, how high—or low—the chances were for an investigation to end in success rather than tragedy.

"But you've told _me_ ," he pointed out.

"You were already involved," Grant said slowly. "You had a right to know."

"…Right," Barnes said, remembering Pierce, remembering their fight, remembering Grant saying, _I have a bad feeling about this guy_. "You really hate being told you're wrong, don't you?"

Grant's mouth quirked in a wry, rueful smile.

"If we can't get help from the office, then what?" Barnes said, bringing them back on track. "Obviously we can't do this on our own, and this right here—" He gestured at the file. "—shows that both the FBI and the CIA might be corrupt too, only we don't know how much. Hell, you think even the deputy commissioner of the NYPD is involved. That doesn't leave us with many options."

"I know."

Then it occurred to Barnes. "What about—" He paused, for fear of sounding ridiculous, and chose a more cautious, general formulation. "What about the Avengers?" There, that sounded better than, _What about Nomad?_

Grant's lips tightened, and he shook his head. "Most of them are linked to S.H.I.E.L.D. At least two of them are agents there, and even Stark worked for them as a consultant. We can't—" His voice wavered, and he stopped to clear his throat. "We can't be sure."

"…Shit," Barnes said after a pause, because now they had to account for the possibility that Iron Man—that the _Hulk_ might be coming for them if they were caught.

"Yeah," Grant said, looking down with a small, awful laugh.

Now Barnes understood why he was fraying around the edges, and reluctant to drag their colleagues into it. They were most definitely screwed.

Silence settled and stretched as he contemplated that thought.

"There is—" Grant said eventually, just before it became suffocating. "I might know someone. He'd help, I think. No, I _know_."

"Can he be trusted, though?"

Grant looked at him and said, "I trust him with my life."

And there it came again, that swooping feeling, tugging at Barnes' insides, making his breath catch. Because Grant said that with utter conviction, like he didn't even have to think about it. Yet when he'd been faced with this nightmare of a situation his first reflex, his first thought, the first person he'd gone to hadn't been that guy, whoever he was.

It had been Bucky.

-

It didn't take long for Grant's fancy phone to beep with an answer to the message he'd sent to his contact. He read it and asked, "Is there a way to access the roof?"

Bucky quirked an eyebrow at him. "What, is he gonna parkour here or something?"

"Or something," Grant said, but didn't add anything else, so apparently he was serious.

Bucky was already regretting his decision to follow his lead. " _Fine_ ," he said with a huff, and went to his bedroom to put on something that was more appropriate for a cool March night than a velvet robe, a t-shirt, and a pair of boxers.

He'd never actually tried to get to the roof of his building but assumed that there had to be a door at the top of the staircase. He was right. However—

"It's locked," he grumbled after testing the handle. He should've expected it, really. "Maybe I can pick it, though," he added. "I have some tools at home."

"Maybe," Grant said. "Let me try something first?"

Bucky didn't see what could be attempted but refrained from rolling his eyes as he stepped back with a sarcastic hand gesture. _By all means_. Grant ignored him. He wrapped his right hand around the knob, braced his right shoulder against the door, jerked, and—and with a ringing crack, it opened.

"How the fuck did you—" Bucky started, but Grant had already stepped through and onto the flat roof. "Did you _break the fucking lock_?"

Grant didn't answer. He was looking up at the cloudy sky and, as Bucky walked over intent on getting an answer, raised a hand over his head as if in a sign. Bucky frowned and looked up in turn, just in time to see something—something huge and dark and _fast_ —dive towards them like a cannon ball, like a missile. _We're dead_ , he thought, but even as he realized that he'd frozen uselessly, the…whatever it was flipped and unfolded itself, revealing two huge, metallic wings framing a disconcertingly human body: a silhouette Bucky knew.

Falcon landed and said, "Hey, Cap."

"Sam," Grant replied, sounding relieved. Even before Falcon's wings had fully folded themselves back into their jetpack, he'd stepped forward to clasp his hand and draw him into a half hug. "Thank you for coming."

"Don't mention it," Falcon said, returning the embrace without hesitation.

_You fucking know_ Falcon _?_ Bucky wanted to scream. Worse, Grant was apparently on _friendly terms_ with him. He had Falcon's number on _speed dial_.

Bucky refrained from saying any of that, but Falcon noticed his presence all the same the second he and Grant parted. "Citizen," he greeted, a lot more formal, almost wary.

"It's okay," Grant said. "He ought to know."

_Know what?_ Bucky almost asked, but didn't, because—

Falcon and Grant had turned towards him, and in the yellowish chiaroscuro of New York City at night, the shape of them both was disturbingly familiar. Side by side they stood, with their chins held high, their broad shoulders straight, their feet parted and solid on the ground.

Suddenly, it was glaringly obvious.

"You're Nomad," Bucky said faintly. "You're fucking Nomad."

As he spoke, he remembered all the times Grant had come up with the most inane excuses to slip away in the middle of the day, all the times Bucky had measured how long it took for him to return—and had never noticed how all those times might coincide with a Nomad sighting. He remembered all the evenings he'd spent scouring the internet, looking at picture after picture of New York's favorite vigilante, reading countless analyses of his appearance and demeanor and the way his body moved—only to fail to recognize it all in the very man who waited for him in front of the office every morning and sat at the desk opposite his every day, and _fuck_. What kind of shit investigative reporter was he, that he hadn't realized the truth sooner? That he'd been fooled by—by an ill-fitting shirt and a dorky pair of glasses? That it hadn't occurred to him, not _once_ , to check whether his tall, broad-shouldered colleague might be a likely candidate for the person under Nomad's mask? It was no wonder Grant looked down on him, given that apparently he was entirely incapable of seeing what was _right in front of his face_.

He had to bury his head in his hands for a minute.

"Bucky—" Grant said, sounding like he felt _guilty_ , of all things.

"Don't," Bucky warned sharply. He didn't know how he would react if Grant tried to apologize for this. Just like he didn't know what it was exactly that he was feeling: anger, shame, indignation, vexation. Hurt. "Just." With an effort he raised his face again. "Just tell me this: does anyone know? At the office, I mean."

If Grant replied, _Oh, yes, all of them, it's kind of this open secret?_ he would have no choice but to hand over his press card and move to Australia to hide his shame.

But what Grant said was, "I'm pretty sure Elle knows. Or at least suspects. Strongly."

"Okay." Barnes nodded: he could live with that. Maybe. "Okay." He took a breath. "Let's go back inside."

-

"We gotta bring in Nat," Falcon said after they'd summarized the situation to him and given him the file to leaf through. When Grant didn't answer, he looked up. "Come on, it's obvious we need her. We're in way over our heads. I'm surprised you didn't get her before you got me."

The look on Grant's face, which had been hesitant and pained to begin with, worsened. "Sam," he said. Falcon paused visibly at his tone. "It's Hydra. They're here, _now_ , and—and I thought they were gone. I thought I'd—" He broke off and dipped his head. "But they're not. They're not, and it turns out they can be _anywhere_."

Falcon's expression wasn't easy to decipher underneath his flight goggles. But he didn't tense, didn't grow hesitant or skeptical. Instead his whole demeanor…softened.

"Yes, they can," he said. Barnes threw him a surprised glance: he hadn't thought Falcon would be so willing to go along with Grant's wild theory. "Doesn't mean they are. Doesn't mean you gotta start seeing them _everywhere_." He paused. "And Nat deserves better than your doubts."

Grant looked at him for a long time, his features drawn—until suddenly they relaxed, and his shoulders lowered, and he let out a sigh. "You're right," he said with a self-deprecating smile.

The one Falcon gave in return was even more dazzling than it was in pictures. "Damn right, I am."

From where he sat, Barnes could only be struck by the ease lining their interaction, the familiarity. Suddenly, he was very aware of all the blog posts and Twitter threads crowding the internet, full of speculation about the true nature of the relationship between those two men. He remembered the heaps of semi-fictional stories that had been written about them, some cute, some moving, some unashamedly explicit.

…Not that he'd read that many of them.

Still, it was awkward. But not enough to fully explain the unpleasant feeling churning in Barnes’ gut as he watched them, as he saw how obviously close they were.

It only worsened from there.

Another message was sent, and while they waited for a reply Grant took out his strange laptop and started showing Barnes and Falcon what he had on it. Of course, he had to explain his cypher first—to Barnes, at least. Falcon seemed to already be familiar with it.

Barnes tried not to mind. Grant's code was a complex one, though. He was still squinting at the screen, trying to see through it, while Grant and Falcon had already moved on to discussing the contents it concealed. Then the intercom rang.

Barnes looked at Grant. Grant exchanged a glance with Falcon, then turned back to him and nodded. Barnes tightened his lips and stood up to answer.

"Hey," a female voice drawled in his ear, "I got an order for Grant O'Connor?"

"Just a sec'," Barnes put his hand on the speaker and whirled around to glare at Grant. "You fucking ordered _food_?" he hissed.

Grant's eyebrows darted up and he smirked. "Looks like I did." Beside him, Falcon smiled, amused.

Barnes rolled his eyes at them both—now was _not_ the time for Grant to remind everyone of how much of a bottomless pit he was—and replied, "Yeah, come on up. Sixth floor," before pressing the buzzer.

He waited by the door with his arms crossed and opened it the second the bell rang. His first impression was of a teenager, of a pink bubble of gum and two messy plaits framed by a cap and a hoodie. Then the bubble popped, and Natalie Rushman smiled at him. "Hey there," she said. "Can I come in?"

She didn't wait for an answer, forcing him to step back so she wouldn't bump into him. He gave her a baleful glare as he locked the door behind her. She ignored it superbly, walking to the coffee table and putting down the white plastic bag she'd been carrying.

"Falcon," she greeted.

"Widow," Falcon replied.

_Wait, what?_ Barnes thought, but then she added, "Grant," in the same tone, exceedingly formal but with an undercurrent of humor.

A spark of unease added itself to the unpleasant feeling in Barnes' gut. The way she said it, 'Grant' sounded like nothing but another codename, and a ridiculous one at that. And Barnes couldn't help but wonder: what if it was? Suddenly, he couldn't be sure. Suddenly, all he knew about his partner—about his interests, his daily rhythm, his lack of friends and close family—felt like nothing, nowhere near the whole story.

His behavior towards Falcon and Ms. Rushman—who was apparently none other than _Black Widow_ —made it obvious. Barnes was used to Grant at the office, pleasant and cooperative towards their colleagues but also distant, hidden behind a veneer of careful politeness: a cautious demeanor that he only discarded in Barnes' presence, where he let himself sprawl, let himself be familiar and stubborn, let himself…revert to what Barnes had assumed was his true self, in a way he didn't with anyone else. Yet now he sat side by side with Falcon, their knees and shoulders brushing, and didn't seem to mind the proximity. Now he tilted his head at Ms. Rushman, his whole attitude a wordless yet teasing challenge—one that she not only understood but also rose to, saying, "I got you chicken tikka masala."

"Yeah," Grant retorted, "and I got you Nazis."

Far from mocking him or looking at him like he was deranged, Ms. Rushman smirked. "My, my," she murmured. "Looks like it's my lucky day."

-

Ms. Rushman didn't keep smiling for long, though, especially not once they told her that S.H.I.E.L.D. might be one of the main institutions involved.

"Nat?" Grant ventured. She'd been staring down at the file for several minutes, her face entirely blank.

She snapped the file shut. "We need Stark."

Grant grimaced faintly. "Is that really necessary?" he asked. Yet despite what he'd said when Barnes first floated over the idea of contacting the Avengers, it didn't sound like his reluctance stemmed from any suspicions regarding Stark's loyalties. Rather it sounded like Stark was an annoyance he'd rather avoid.

Ms. Rushman raised her eyebrows at him as she took a phone out of her pocket. "He's the only one with both the technology and the brains to get us the intel we need without being traced," she pointed out. "That, and do you want to hear him whine about being left out for the next ten years? Because _I_ don't."

Grant didn't have time to reply: she'd already dialed and was bringing the phone to her ear.

The call, when it was picked up—by Stark, Barnes assumed, despite it being the middle of the night—was brief. "I need a ride," Ms. Rushman said. She listened for a couple seconds, then rattled off Barnes' address. Another reply came, to which she said, "Perfect," before hanging up and telling them, "He's sending a car."

Given the late hour there wouldn't be much traffic, but it'd still take a while for a vehicle to get there. In the meantime, Barnes fully expected them all to go back to the files Grant had on his computer. They didn't. Instead Ms. Rushman—perhaps looking for a distraction—zeroed in on the corner where he kept his research on Nomad and made a beeline for it. A second later, Falcon had stood up and was following her.

Barnes almost protested, feeling a spike of embarrassment lined with indignation that they'd disregard the very serious and very pressing issue of what they seemed all too willing to admit was a worldwide Nazi conspiracy in favor of gawking at his poor attempts at piercing the secret of New York's favorite vigilante. But speaking up wouldn't have helped. Worse, it might even have spurred Ms. Rushman and Falcon on, made them wonder what exactly Barnes was trying to hide.

"Don't mind them," Grant said. He'd done the decent thing and remained sitting on the couch. Barnes threw him a grateful glance.

The second their eyes met, several things occurred to him at once.

The first was that all the midday trysts he'd suspected were happening between Grant and Ms. Rushman never actually had. Every single time Grant had vanished during the day and come back a rumpled mess: that had all been due to him discarding his work attire in favor of his tactical suit, then hastily putting the former back on after a couple of hours spent running and jumping around, sometimes even fighting. From there, Barnes became suddenly certain that Grant and Ms. Rushman weren't and had never been an item. Not with the way she'd greeted Grant, which had been no different than how she'd addressed Falcon, and miles away from how she'd behaved the few times she'd come by the office to take Grant out to lunch. Not with the way Grant had reacted, teasing but not quite affectionate, and nowhere near tender. Obviously, the scenes at the office had been nothing more than that: a display, an act whose only purpose had been to add yet another layer to their respective covers.

It might've been a relief if not for the realization that followed, namely that all the speculation Barnes had read about Nomad and sometimes taken part in himself—a selection of which Black Widow and Falcon were looking at right now—hadn't been about some abstract entity who most of the time didn't even feel completely real, but about the man sitting beside him. Even—especially—the speculation surrounding his physique and measurements and…strategically placed assets. It also meant that the _dreams_ Barnes had had—

He wasn't going to think about the dreams.

Instead he brought his attention back to Grant's computer, intent on understanding his cypher and on figuring out where to go from there. Grant let him. Still, it was a relief when the car arrived twenty minutes later, forcing Ms. Rushman and Falcon to stop their snooping and troop out of his flat.

"Not bad," Ms. Rushman told him as she passed him, along with a smile. Barnes spent the entirety of the ensuing car ride wondering whether she'd meant that as a compliment or an insult.

Then they reached Stark Tower, and suddenly it was his turn to be at risk of growing distracted, because from the underground garage the elevator carried them directly to one of _Tony Stark's personal labs_. The place where Stark came up with his newest ideas and worked on his latest experiments. The place that Barnes had long since admitted to himself he'd be ready to—well, maybe not kill, but at least _maim_ in order to access and report on exclusively. Not that Stark had ever replied to any of his requests for an interview, not back when he'd decided to shut down SI's weapon manufacturing branch, not when Barnes had been looking into the arc reactor technology, not ever.

Yet apparently Stark knew who he was. After a general greeting, the first thing he told Grant was, "I see you've brought the paps."

Grant's shoulders tensed in immediate indignation. "Bucky's _not_ —"

"Good thinking," Stark went on heedlessly, "you never know when you might need to make a scene, and make it very public. Which—" He glanced at Ms. Rushman, then at Falcon, then back at Grant. "—is that the case right now? Because if not, you should know that that's definitely the vibe I'm getting."

"It might be," Ms. Rushman said.

Much like her, Stark lost most of his flippancy as they explained their suspicions.

"I know it's hard to believe—" Grant tried to say, but again Stark cut him off.

"It's not." Barnes stared at him incredulously: he'd thought that Stark at least would express doubts, or at least make a quip about Grant putting all of this down to a _Nazi cult_. But no. Stark was pale, his lips tightly pressed together. It made the circles under his eyes stand out. "I think you're right about S.H.I.E.L.D. Remember that time I took a peek at their projects? A small one, true, but still. There were _things_. Not just the whole—" He waved a hand. "—Phase 2 bullshit, but—and now I realize I definitely should've recognized it for what it really was, but." He paused. "I don't know. I got distracted, I guess. That's a thing I do, you all know that."

He smiled, but it was thin, overlaid with self-deprecation and guilt.

"Tony, you were recovering from sending a nuke into _space_ ," Grant said.

"Eh, that was nothing."

"Just like Killian bombing your house in Cali last year _while you were still_ _inside_ , and abducting Ms. Potts was nothing?" Grant asked, not giving an inch.

Stark twitched. "Maybe not," he conceded, although he was visibly pissed about it. "But I still should've noticed _something_. You definitely did, what with how you told Fury to go fuck himself when he offered you that job. You knew not to trust him _or_ S.H.I.E.L.D."

Now Grant's lips were the ones curling down. "I don't believe Fury's Hydra."

"If he isn't, then he's still letting all this happen," Falcon butted in, "either because he doesn't notice, or because he doesn't see what's wrong with it. Tell me how that isn't _worse_."

Stark pointed at him with a smile. "Exactly. He signed off on Phase 2."

"So did the World Security Council," Grant retorted.

Barnes would really have liked to know what 'Phase 2' was supposed to be. Nick Fury he knew, or at least knew _of_ , but when it came to everything else this conversation was only making him aware of how much information he was missing—information that might explain why everyone had already agreed with Grant that this could be Hydra. For now, the only link he could fathom was the fact that S.H.I.E.L.D. was a successor of the S.S.R., which had played a central role in the fight against that cultish division back during World War II. But that made no sense: the S.S.R. had been an enemy of Hydra. So how could S.H.I.E.L.D. have ended up infiltrated by them?

"Yeah, let's take a closer look at those guys," Falcon was saying. "Pierce might not be the only dirty one of the lot."

"On it." Stark turned to Grant. "Since you clearly got a better eye than I do, how about this: I get you a large selection of intel, and you tell me what pings on your radar. Hydradar. Whatever."

-

Stark dove right into it, roping both Grant and Ms. Rushman along with him. Soon they were surrounded by the kind of holographic screens Barnes had thought only existed in movies and as faulty experiments, talking strategy with a thick layer of technobabble. Barnes managed to follow it for the most part. He even contributed some ideas about what to look for and where. But given that computer science and IT weren't his favored areas, he left them to it.

The problem with that was that it took time. Hacking involved a lot of waiting around while the programs did their work—provided they were successful and even yielded anything—which was made even worse when one wasn't the person directing them. Barnes tried to busy himself with what Grant had already gathered to determine what leads they should pursue in what order of priority. But the cypher was making it difficult, and in the bubble of quiet that settled around him his body found both the time and space to realize that it was now well past 3 a.m., going on 4, on a week night.

Falcon, who'd admitted himself that he had no computer skills and had been helping Barnes sort through Grant's intel, noticed the increasing frequency of Barnes’ badly repressed yawns, if only because they inevitably set him off too. Eventually he sat back in his chair—he'd long since discarded his flight gear, goggles included—and said, "Okay, I've had enough. I need a break—we all do."

At that, Stark looked up from his screen. His eyes were wide open, his hair a mess: he looked wide awake, buzzing with energy as if he'd just stuck his fingers in a socket. "Speak for yourself," he said. "Because I sure don't."

"…Right," Falcon said, his voice as full of skepticism as his expression. "Us normal, _human_ people need a break. Come on, Barnes."

He stood up, and after a second of hesitation Barnes did the same, gathering his coat and scarf.

He was the only one. Ms. Rushman simply told them, "See you in a few hours," while Grant graced them with a brief glance and a smile. He still wasn't looking great, but he didn't appear to be waning either. _I don't need a lot of sleep_ , he'd said once, but suddenly Barnes knew that it was more than that. He remembered what everyone had agreed on in the wake of the Chitauri invasion: that Nomad had to be enhanced.

Somehow, Barnes wasn't quite able to smile back.

"You know where the guest rooms are," Stark said, dismissive. Falcon nodded and headed for the elevator that had brought them up. Barnes followed, feeling both reluctant at the thought of interrupting their work and eager to be alone so that he could at least try to process some of what he'd learned over the past few hours.

Falcon seemed to perceive some of it. After a few seconds of silence that bordered on awkward as the elevator carried them down a few floors, he said, "Things will look clearer after a few hours of sleep."

"I'm not sure I'll be much help even then," Barnes admitted, and was surprised at himself for saying so out loud. But when one was in the same room as Tony Stark—as _Iron Man_ —and people who were apparently _superhuman_ , it wasn't easy not to doubt oneself at least a little.

Falcon threw him a knowing glance. "You will," he said. The elevator stopped, and they stepped out into a short corridor lined with a couple of doors on both sides. Falcon led Barnes to the second one on the right. "It's good that you're here," he said without looking at Barnes. "That you know. St— Grant's wanted to tell you the truth for a long time. About Nomad, I mean."

Barnes looked at him as Falcon opened the door and gestured for him to go inside. "I see," he said slowly, which was better than, _So not the_ whole _truth, then_. Starting with his real name, apparently.

Falcon seemed to realize that his attempt at reassurance wasn't working. "Just get some sleep," he said.

Barnes nodded, and closed the door between them.

The room he'd been given was large and luxurious despite its simplicity. A double bed with bedside tables, a desk and a cupboard worked together to give it the feel of a hotel room, but one that was swankier by far than anything Barnes had ever been able to afford. The view from the huge bay windows that took up the entire wall beyond the bed made that obvious. On the left, a door led to a large en-suite bathroom.

Barnes hung his coat and scarf in the cupboard before he went to stare out at the New York night, thoughts turning over and swirling and overlapping like the disturbed waters of a stormy sea. Exhaustion was pressing down on him, dragging him down, making all he'd learned feel immense and insurmountable.

There was Hydra and the distinct possibility that their world had been shaped and twisted by a malevolent plot stretching back decades. There was Pierce and his plans, whose ends and means weren't completely clear yet. There was Grant, with whom Barnes had thought for a second that reconciliation could be possible, only to find out right afterwards that he'd been right, in a way: all he'd thought he knew about Grant might really be a lie, or might simply be nothing compared to all that he _didn't_ know.

Tired as Barnes was, all this left him with nothing but a tight throat and feeling of…inadequacy. Of powerlessness bordering on fear, on pain, on bitterness. He tried to turn away from it, distracted himself by looking for the switch to close the curtains and divesting himself of his shoes and clothes so that he could slide into bed. He put his phone on one of the bedside tables and lay down, noticing despite everything how soft the bedsheets were, how comfortable the mattress, how plump the pillow.

It wouldn't help, he thought, fully expecting his thoughts to assault him again in seconds. But that was underestimating his exhaustion: he settled and, in under a minute, was out like a light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments still welcome! Next chapter on Monday :)


	7. Chapter 7

The harsh ringing of his phone woke Barnes up with a start. For a second, he remained frozen, heart in his throat. Then he found some of his footing and expelled a breath: he was in bed, and someone was calling. With a string of curses, he started fighting his way through the covers and pillows—since when did he own so many pillows?—until his hand caught his phone and turned its screen towards him.

The call was from Elle. Barnes frowned at the name in bafflement, until he saw the time. His breath caught, his eyes widened, and he sat up in alarm because fucking _shit_ he was late for work, he was _very_ late for work, which _never_ happened, and—

And this wasn't his bedroom. He stared at the cupboard facing the foot of the bed, at the curtains obscuring the bay windows, and suddenly remembered all that had happened the night before, all that had transpired. But now it was late morning, and he wasn't at work, and Elle was calling.

He couldn't let it go to voicemail.

"Barnes," she said the second he picked up, before he could even utter a greeting. Her voice was dangerously clipped.

Barnes swallowed. He was a dead man. Or, worse: fired. "Elle," he replied.

"When I told you to find out where O'Connor was, I didn't mean imitate his disappearing act."

"I know."

" _Did_ you find him?"

"I did," Barnes replied hurriedly. "He's…" Except that he couldn't tell her what was going on, could he? "We're working on something."

There was a pointed silence. "Well, I'm glad to hear that you're back on good enough terms to take joint initiative," she said dryly. "I'm less glad you appear to think it means you can neglect your actual assignments."

Barnes opened his mouth to say, _We're not_ , except that that would've been a lie. Instead he said, "It's something big."

That caught her attention. "How big?"

Barnes bit his lips, deeply aware of the fragility of the situation. Of what he and Grant and his teammates knew, but most of all what they _didn't._ Of the danger they were already in, just from that patchy knowledge. Of how meager their chances of uncovering everything and taking it apart were. Of the consequences, for them and for anyone they would've implied in their search, if they failed. "You trusted me on the Hammer Tech case," he said.

He was met by silence. It didn't surprise him: he was asking for a lot. What's more, he was doing it in the wake of months during which neither he nor Grant had been at their best, letting a personal matter get in the way of their work and making Elle question their reliability.

Suddenly he wondered: what was he going to do, if she refused to give them the leeway they needed?

But she didn't. Instead she said, "I'll expect a progress report in person before the end of the week."

Barnes let out a relieved breath. "Copy that," he said. "And, Elle?"

"What?"

"Thanks."

She paused. "Get to work, Barnes," she said, and hung up.

-

"Elle called," Barnes said when he rejoined Grant and the others in the lab, guided by Ms. Rushman, who'd been waiting for him when he'd stepped out of his room. Grant looked up at those words, his eyes widening and his face slackening in the most perfect example of an _Oh shit_ face Barnes had ever seen. Barnes was almost relieved by it: clearly Grant's work at the _Bulletin_ hadn't just been a cover, ready to be discarded at a moment's notice. He did care about it, enough that Barnes was able to summon a smile and reassure him. "I got us a reprieve."

" _Thank you_ ," Grant said. It sounded so heartfelt that Barnes had to look away.

"Better hope this works out though," he said. "What did you find?"

"A lot and yet nowhere near enough," said Dr. Banner, whose presence Barnes only noticed then.

He definitely did _not_ squeak— _Dr. Banner_ , _here_ , talking to _him_ —and recovered quickly by listening intently to what was being said. The gist of it was that what data they'd been able to obtain thanks to Stark seemed to confirm their suspicions; solid, definite evidence remained out of their grasp. S.H.I.E.L.D. was indeed at the center of it all, at least when it came to the U.S., but its bases—and especially the Triskelion—all relied on a closed network: one could not access it from outside the building. Some of the intel they needed might even only be accessible from one specific desktop.

They needed to find a way in. The question was: how?

"The kid could do it," Stark said.

"No," Grant retorted at once. "Peter stays out of this."

Barnes snapped his head towards him. "Peter," he repeated. "You mean Parker?"

"Yes," Grant said with a quick glance. "And no," he added at once, returning his attention to Stark, "we're not bringing him in."

"Why not?" Stark protested. "He'd have no problem climbing the walls, he can slip in through a window—a vent. Easy peasy."

"He's a kid!"

"He's not a _normal_ kid! He can lift a bus!" Grant only glared, unyielding. Stark threw his hands up. "Come on, he's your Padawan!"

"If he is, then as his Master I say we're not involving him."

Stark gaped at him for a second. "You've watched _Star Wars_!" he exclaimed, pointing accusingly. His outrage had nothing on Barnes' though, because _what the fucking hell_ , _Parker_ was in on this? And here Grant had said that no one at the office knew—unless Parker didn't count, because obviously he was one of them too. Was everyone Barnes had met over the past year secretly a fucking superhero? What was next, Castillo was secretly Hawkeye, what?

Grant was rolling his eyes. "Of course I've watched _Star Wars_ , do you have any idea how many people told me to watch that thing? And yet, despite it being a pretty central theme to the whole series, _somehow_ everyone missed the whole fascist takeover when it started happening in their own backyard. What's up with that, do people think that because it's sci-fi somehow it's not _relevant_?"

"Now might not be the time for an essay on the educative function of cinema as a reflection of society and history," Ms. Rushman pointed out wryly.

Grant gave her a mulish look but didn't contradict her. "Anyhow, we don't need to climb the building," he said. "Tony's a consultant, he can go in as such, and Nat can follow as his assistant."

Ms. Rushman nodded. "I'll get you a meeting with the engineers," she told Stark. "They've been begging for months for you to come in and explain the schematics you sent them."

"What, that thing for the next-gen helicarriers? What's so hard to understand?"

"What about us, though?" Falcon butted in, perceiving that they were in danger of getting distracted again. "Because they'll definitely make a fuss if _you_ come in through the front door."

He was talking to Grant, who frowned thoughtfully, then said, "Let's go ask Peggy. If anyone knows how to access the building another way, she does."

Falcon didn't look entirely convinced, but Ms. Rushman said, "It's worth a try. And if that doesn't work, I'm sure Hawkeye can come up with something, but—"

Grant nodded. "Yeah, it'd be better for us not to involve him just yet and keep him as back-up."

"Also, we need to know where Pierce is," Ms. Rushman went on. "Ideally, we'd make our move when we know for sure he won't be in D.C. and won't be able to come back at a moment's notice."

"I don't think we've looked at his daily planner," Stark said.

"He's in New York this week," Barnes said. "I don't know the exact days, but tomorrow morning for sure."

Everyone turned their heads towards him.

"And you know that how?" Stark asked.

"I'm scheduled to meet him for an interview."

There was a silence.

"Well, that's convenient," Falcon said.

"That's only one day away—the timeline'd be pretty rushed,” Ms. Rushman said speculatively. “But we should be able to pull it off. What time do you meet him exactly?"

Barnes opened his mouth to answer, but Grant spoke over him. "Wait a minute, do you really— _no_." Now _he_ was the one everyone was staring at. "No. He's not—you're not going."

"Why the fuck not?" Barnes asked. He was beginning to see what Ms. Rushman had understood at once. "You need him to be away, and this way you'll be sure he is. Even better, he'll be busy—he'll be _distracted_."

But Grant was shaking his head. "No," he repeated. He glanced around. "We're not sending a _civilian_ all on his own to—"

Barnes scoffed, vexed at the sheer condescension of the word: civilian. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"It's not about confidence," Grant retorted. "It's _dangerous_."

"Yeah, and?" Barnes said, goading, because Grant was frowning and his voice was rising and _this_ Barnes knew, from months and months of working with the man. It hadn't been all fake, after all, it hadn't all been a lie: Barnes _knew_ how Grant worked, how to push his buttons, how to make him yield ground and admit that Barnes was right. If Grant thought that the whole Nomad thing changed anything, he was in for one hell of a surprise. "Do I look like I care?"

"You should."

"Well, I don't! Come on, you know I've done worse—and it's not like Pierce will even suspect that I know anything. He's got no reason to, _he's_ the one who approached me in the first place."

"Exactly! We don't know what he's got planned for you, and until we know that, I say—"

"What, that I stop playing along and cancel the appointment at the last minute?"

"To start with!"

Barnes rolled his eyes. "Sure, because _that_ won't make him suspicious at all—me dropping the whole thing after everything I did to make sure it happened."

"You'll just say something urgent came up and—"

"And obviously you don't get it, do you?" Barnes snapped. "One thing we can know for sure is that he's looked me up, and he's got a pretty good idea of how I work. He's got to know how—what I'd be ready to do for a piece. Especially a piece like this one." He felt self-conscious, suddenly, admitting to this in front of a bunch of complete strangers. It wasn't something he was necessarily proud of. The realization that came alongside it did not help: that his ambition was probably why Pierce had chosen him, if only for all the things Barnes would've agreed to overlook for the sake of it, all the ways in which it could be molded. "He knows there’s just no way I'd miss this opportunity," he went on, more subdued, "that I'd cancel, and risk being told it's impossible to reschedule a second time."

"We'll just have to make your excuse something big enough to—"

"So we'll make up an alien invasion? Because that's pretty much the only thing I'd put before an exclusive interview with the fucking _Secretary of State_ —and if I do that, he's bound to notice pretty quick that there aren’t any E.T.s flying around in the sky and he's not stupid, he'll know something's up. How safe do you think I'll be _then_?"

Grant's jaw ticked, and he looked—not quite furious, but something close to it. "If we move quickly enough—"

"Yeah, and we need Pierce to be distracted so you _can._ " Barnes turned to Ms. Rushman, who'd been watching the scene with a smile at the corner of her mouth. Beside her, Stark looked like Christmas had come early. "I'm doing it," Barnes said, his tone final. "Is there anything I need to know?"

Ms. Rushman's smile widened. "Plenty."

-

Ms. Rushman led him to a separate room to prepare for the interview without Grant trying to raise any further objections. She wanted to see Barnes’ professional persona up close so as to evaluate how it'd hold when faced with Pierce. She was also intent on reviewing the questions he'd planned on asking, tweaking some of them and adding a few others.

"Might as well try and get some incriminating evidence while we're at it," she said.

If Pierce hadn't been a corrupt wannabe fascist with dictatorial ambitions, Barnes would almost have felt bad for him, caught as he was going to be under the magnifying glass crafted by both Elle Richmond and Black Widow.

They were still in the middle of that, debating on how to transition from one added question to the next for maximum effect, when there was a knock on the door. It was Grant.

"Hey, I just—I wanted to say goodbye,” he said. “Sam and I need to go now if we want to be in D.C. before visiting hours are over, so…" He trailed off, looking at Barnes. His previous anger had faded, to be replaced by a complicated expression whose main component Barnes identified as worry. "Good luck," Grant said. "And—be careful."

Barnes would've rolled his eyes and pointed out that _he_ wasn't going to be in any real danger—except that suddenly he realized that _Grant_ would be. He was about to rush into the kind of danger that couldn't be dismissed or downplayed, the kind that involved people who carried lethal weapons and knew how to use them and wouldn’t have any qualms about directing them at Grant if they found him out. The fact that Grant was Nomad didn't matter: he might be enhanced, he wasn't invincible. So now _Barnes_ was the one who wanted to say, ‘Wait’, to say, ‘No’. But Grant wouldn't listen to his arguments any more that Barnes had to his.

All he could say, heart in his throat, was a weak, "You too."

"Take a gun," Ms. Rushman said.

Grant smirked fleetingly at her, glanced one last time at Barnes, and left, closing the door behind himself.

-

It took Barnes and Ms. Rushman a few more hours to finish preparing the interview in a way that left them both satisfied. When they emerged, they found the lab nearly deserted, except for Stark.

"You done?" he asked, looking up from a cluster of tiny electronic and metal pieces he'd been assembling.

"Yes," Ms. Rushman said. "Nomad and Falcon?"

"Off to punchier pastures."

"Gear?"

Stark brought a hand to his chest. "Your doubts wound me. Especially since you know first-hand how generous I can be when it comes to equipment. Hell, I even got Cap his dinner plate back, for old times' sake."

Ms. Rushman smirked. "Seems appropriate. What about Banner?"

"Yeah, he's taking a well-needed break." He and Ms. Rushman shared a meaningful look before he turned to Barnes. "What about you, you ready to go?"

Barnes raised his chin. "I am."

It wasn’t his turn just yet, though, and in the meantime came what he already knew would be the hardest part about this: waiting. Stark forced a few devices on him and made sure that he understood how to use them, then had him escorted back to the garage. It was already too late in the day for Barnes to make an appearance at work, so he asked to be directly driven home.

Now he was on his own, with an entire evening and night unfolding before him, and an obligation to treat it as nothing but the end of yet another normal day: feed Alpine, eat dinner, check some rumors on the internet, brush his teeth, go to bed. Like nothing had happened. Like nothing _was_ going to happen.

The quiet of his flat had never felt so oppressive.

Unsurprisingly, he slept badly. He couldn't get his mind to settle. Whenever he started to drift off, his mind inevitably summoned distorted pictures of the worst possible outcomes that this could have. Hydra, winning. Grant, failing.

Grant, dying.

When his alarm rang, it was almost a relief. _Now_ it was go time.

He showered, washed his hair, and shaved carefully, before even more carefully choosing his clothes. _Like it or not, this is a seduction game_ , Ms. Rushman had said. _He'll be playing you to get you exactly where he wants you. But_ , she'd added when she'd noticed his mouth curling down, _that means he leaves himself open for_ you _to play_ him.

In the end, he settled for a combination of trousers, shirt and vest in blue-grey hues that made his eyes pop out but also made him look slightly younger than he was. He tied his tie in a careful Kelvin knot, then forced himself to choke down a cup of coffee and a piece of toast before making his way to the office: just another day at work.

"Looking _sharp_ , Barnes," Lawson told him when he took off his coat, and he made himself smirk at her like he normally would have, while ignoring the empty chair at the desk opposite his.

Amongst the things Stark had given him was a phone. Knowing that Pierce's security would check his bag before allowing him in the Secretary's presence, Barnes put it away in a drawer, which he locked. Then he went through his emails. Before long, it was time for him to leave again.

"Barnes," Elle called as he made his way to the elevator. He glanced back. "I'll see you in my office when you get back."

A pointed look at Grant's empty seat made it clear that they weren't only going to talk about the interview. Barnes nodded, and went.

-

The address Pierce's office had given him this time wasn't that of an office building, but of a hotel. And while the room he was led to by Pierce's PA was the sitting area of a suite, entirely separate from the bedroom—nothing out of the ordinary, nothing untoward—Barnes knew that the choice of location had to be deliberate. Meaningful. It was no coincidence that none of their meetings had taken place in D.C., in an official setting. Much like the restaurant, this spoke of intimacy, of something like trust.

He couldn't help but wonder whether he would've fallen for it if he hadn't been made aware of the truth behind it all. Not that he let any of it show, hiding most of his nerves behind a pleasant smile as Pierce greeted him and dismissed his PA, telling her that they were not to be disturbed except in case of the utmost emergency. _He'll flatter you by hinting at how important this meeting is to him_ , Ms. Rushman had said.

"Can I offer you anything to drink?" Pierce asked as he guided him towards the couch. "I promise to stay away from the wine this time."

_He'll make it feel like you're complicit, like you already share something. Like you're not close, but you could be—and imagine what that could mean for your career_.

Barnes chuckled. "I wouldn't say no to a cup of coffee," he said as he sat down.

"Perfect," Pierce said, walking over to a long table tucked against the wall, where a luxurious coffee machine sat. "Milk?"

"None, thank you," Barnes replied. He set up his recorder, took out his notepad, and clicked his heavy pen. "I'll have one sugar, though."

Pierce nodded, and soon came back with two cups that he placed on the low table between the couch and the armchair in which he then sat. "So," he said, smoothing down his grey suit. "First things first: I wanted to apologize for the time it took for us to set up this second meeting."

"You have nothing to apologize for," Barnes said with a smile. "We all know how busy a key figure such as yourself has to be. Besides," he added, and let his smile widen, "I expect the wait will be worth it."

Pierce watched him for a second, then nodded, looking pleased. "I believe it will be. Now." He propped his elbows on the arms of the chair and interlaced his fingers. "What do you want to ask me, James?"

Barnes glanced down at his notes. "Well, I'll take a page out of your book and say, first things first: for years you’ve refused to give any interviews." He looked up and met Pierce's gaze. "Why now?" _Make sure he understands, 'Why me?'_

Pierce smiled. "You are well-placed to know what my usual answer is when it comes to interview requests."

"You'd rather let your actions speak for themselves," Barnes quoted.

"Exactly. But times have changed. The _public_ has changed, and these days actions alone aren’t enough. Not anymore. Sure, people like their government to be efficient, but they also want it to be accessible. They want to understand what it’s doing. And it's come to my attention that they don't always get it right. I've realized that it's important not to just do things, but also to explain _why_ you're doing them—especially since some decisions can be difficult to make sense of in the short term. You have to make people see the bigger picture. To present them with your vision, so to speak."

"And you believe that I can help you do that," Barnes said, not letting any of his growing unease show as he understood what role Pierce intended to have him play. What role he _would've_ played, if Grant hadn't decided to stick his nose into the whole business and found a string on which to pull.

"I know you can." Pierce smiled. He obviously meant it to be reassuring and flattering, but Barnes knew better now. This wasn't anything close to a compliment.

Barnes lowered his eyes and made it look like he was trying to repress a smile. Inside he was chafing, realization mixing with dismay and anger and _shame_ —that he would've been so easy to manipulate, his ambition so easy to exploit. He pushed it all down, though, and once it had all been bundled up into a tight ball and put away to be dealt with later, he looked back up. Checked that his recorder was still working. Shifted in his seat until he was more comfortable, crossing his legs and reaching up with a hand to brush away a stray curl of hair that had fallen onto his forehead. He held his pen poised over his notepad and smiled. "Tell me then, Mr. Secretary," he said. "What _is_ your vision?"

-

The interview went off without a hitch. Pierce was attentive to Barnes' questions, took his time to answer them, was both detailed and careful. He didn't let anything interrupt them, not even lunchtime: he simply used the landline to call for room service. By the time the interview came to a close, the meal had been eaten and a few hours had passed.

Had Barnes been unaware of the truth, he would've been soaring, already writing out parts of the article in his head and most of all imagining his peers’ reactions when the finished product would come out: the incredulity, the admiration, the _envy_. Instead he was left a bit reeling, almost surprised that everything had gone according to plan, optimistic as it had been.

"I believe that concludes it," he said, and clicked his pen shut—thus deactivating the small force field that had been blocking all cell and internet reception in a 20 feet radius, or so Stark had claimed. Barnes had resolute plans to figure out how the thing even _worked_ , be it by forcing the man to sit down and explain or by taking the 'pen' apart himself. He'd spent less than a day in Stark's lab, but it had been enough for him to catch a glimpse of countless devices that were entire lightyears ahead of what was available on the market. Barnes _had_ to find out more, about all of it.

That was for later, though. For now, he and Pierce exchanged a few more pleasantries while Barnes packed up his things. By the time he was done, Pierce had already taken his phone out of his pocket and was faintly frowning down at it.

"I'll send the draft to your office as soon as it's done," Barnes said to draw his attention back towards him. "But in the meantime, I might have some extra questions. How should I proceed if that's the case?"

"Take that up with Susan," Pierce said distractedly, almost dismissively—a slip-up that he noticed at once. He looked up and smiled, making his features relax. "I mean— If you do have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact my office, and we’ll make arrangements for a phone call."

Barnes nodded. "Very well. Thank you."

They shook hands, and Pierce escorted him out of his suite with a little bit more haste than was polite. Barnes pretended not to notice. He thanked him one last time, and left.

-

He walked three blocks away from the hotel, hailed a cab, and waited until he was inside it and they'd turned around the corner to breathe out, and close his eyes, and let himself relax. He'd done it. He'd _done_ it.

He was almost trembling, and so kept his eyes closed, his breathing deep and slow. In and out, in and out, slow and easy as he sat there, listening to the tinny sound of the driver's radio, focusing on the feel and smell of the car around him.

He'd mostly calmed down by the time they reached the office. He left a generous tip and went inside, keeping his shoulders straight and his expression unconcerned all the way to his desk. Once there, the first thing he did was make copies of the recording of the interview. One went onto his computer, another onto an external hard drive, a third one he transferred to the phone Stark had given him, which would then store it onto the man's private servers: the most secure place they had at their disposal.

The file started loading, and Barnes leaned back in his chair with a sigh. Now that he was back in a familiar environment, an environment that felt somewhat safe, he could feel the tension leaving him. It was replaced by bone-deep exhaustion, overlaid by an unpleasant sensation, like the sick game Pierce had been playing was sticking to his skin, slick and tacky. Barnes wanted nothing more than to scrub it off. Had this been a normal day, he would just have picked a fight with Grant: the best way to shake things off.

But this wasn't a normal day. Grant wasn't there. He was off in D.C., probably inside the Triskelion already, if all had gone well. Who knew what might be happening to him that very moment.

Stark's phone pinged, drawing Barnes out of his anxious thoughts. The transfer was complete. No matter what happened now, he'd done his part. He'd distracted Pierce for as long as possible and gathered what evidence he could while he was at it. Pierce couldn't take any of it back.

Now all Barnes could do was wait.

-

"Those aren't the questions we agreed on," Elle said. They were in her office, where she'd summoned him to hear his report on his interview with Pierce. Barnes hadn't even dragged his feet on the way there: he'd been glad for the distraction.

"Not all of them, no," he said. "I reworked things a bit at the last minute."

He tried not to quake when she narrowed her eyes at him. He knew what she thought of last-minute changes, especially the ones that she hadn't been informed of beforehand. But even she couldn't deny that these had paid off. "Seems like it went well," she conceded.

Barnes gave a quick smile. "I believe it did."

Elle leafed through his notes for a little while longer, then nodded to herself and handed them back over. "Now," she said, pinning him with her gaze as she folded her hands on top of her desk. "Where is O'Connor?"

Barnes had expected her to ask, yet still found himself fumbling for an answer. "He's following up on some leads."

Elle pursed her lips, a clear sign that he was trying her patience. "Any chance you'll tell me what you _think_ you've uncovered, or do I have to—"

She was interrupted by her phone beeping. Raising a hand so Barnes would wait, she drew it closer to check what it was. She always did: a message from one of her many contacts could always be urgent. Barnes knew at once that this one was. Elle's expression changed, her gaze sharpening, her eyebrows drawing together as she picked up the phone and started typing.

He opened his mouth to ask, ‘What's going on?’, but before he could, there was a commotion in the main office. Elle looked up but showed no sign of surprise. Without a word, she stood up and went to the door, opening it and stepping through. Barnes scrambled to follow her and, when he did, found most of his colleagues stopped in the middle of their work, staring up at the screens hung on one side of the room. They were all displaying the same thing: an aerial view of the Triskelion, smoke billowing out of its eastern column. There had been an explosion, the rolling text said. Its origin was as yet unknown.

Barnes felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

Grant.

_Fuck_.

-

The next half hour was a complete mess, phones and fax machines ringing and beeping incessantly, people running around and making phone calls and shouting and scouring the internet and social media, trying to get answers, to understand what was going on. But no one seemed to _know_ anything, not even their many contacts based in D.C. The air was filled with tension, bordering on barely contained panic. No one said it, but the memory of 9/11 weighed heavily on everyone's mind. They were all just waiting to hear that something else had blown up: the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, Stark Tower, _anything_.

All of them except Barnes, who'd gone and dug up Stark's phone from his desk, hoping for a call or a message. But there wasn't. The screen remained dark, the device silent, and Barnes couldn't even use it to make contact himself. There were no numbers saved for him to call. That wasn't what the phone was for. Its main purpose was data transfer. If Barnes had ended up in trouble during his interview with Pierce, he wouldn't have used it to let Stark know. What he would've done was to press the button twice on the small device disguised as an USB stick that he'd added to his keys. It would've sent an alarm and activated a tracker; what it wouldn't have done was connect him with anyone.

At the time, Barnes hadn't realized what that would mean.

"Barnes," Elle called, drawing him out of his powerless glaring, "I want you on this."

For a second he was unable to answer: his jaw was clenched shut, and he felt like his insides had been scooped out, taking his voice along with them. Then he huffed out a breath, and managed to say, "I kind of already am?"

Elle stared at him. She recovered quickly, though, and dragged him back into her office, shutting the door behind them. "What do you know?"

"I can't tell you yet," Barnes said.

"Barnes—"

"Elle, I _can't_."

"Give me _something_ ," she snarled, making him nearly startle, because she never did that. She never _needed_ to do that.

"It's not a 9/11 situation," he said.

"Is it a Chitauri situation, then?"

"No, it's—" He swallowed, lowered his voice. "It's not a situation where the enemy comes from the _outside_."

She looked at him with her eyes wide, lips so tightly pressed together that they looked bloodless. He dreaded what she might ask next, but before she could Parker's voice rung out, shouting a shrill, "Holy _shit_!" A second later he was bursting into Elle's office, brandishing his phone, "You need to see this, ma—" Elle's glare brought him to a halt as he suddenly realized what he'd done: he hadn't even _knocked_. "—dam," he finished faintly. "Mr. Barnes. Sorry, but—"

He squeaked when Elle snatched the phone from his hand to look at what he'd found. She frowned at it for a second, then her whole expression changed. "Holy shit indeed," she said, sounding almost incredulous, and if _that_ was her reaction, Barnes had to know what this was. He stepped closer to look over her shoulder.

It was files. Countless files: emails, memos, budget outlines, mission reports, strategy briefings, and on most of them, a header. _S.H.I.E.L.D_.'s header.

"Where did you find this?" Elle asked.

"Online," Parker replied. Barnes watched him dumbly, because those were S.H.I.E.L.D.'s internal files, from their closed-circuit database, and if they were _here_ , available to the public, then that meant—it meant that they'd done it. Grant and Falcon and Ms. Rushman and Stark had done it, the operation was a success. It meant— "It's all just been dumped—"

"Take Henricks and Taylor with you," Elle told Barnes, handing him the phone. It almost slipped from his numb fingers before he managed to get enough of a hold of himself to tighten his grip. "Mendez, too, plus whoever from cyber you think might be useful. Parker, you go with him. And—Barnes," she called, stopping him as he was about to leave her office. He glanced back. "Just tell me this. Is O'Connor over there?"

Barnes didn't say anything. He couldn't: if it came out that Nomad was involved, or if this simply blew up in their faces, they needed a minimum of plausible deniability. Elle knew him, though, and knew how to interpret the look on his face. She nodded, and said, "Go."

Barnes went.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments welcome! Last chapter + epilogue will follow on Wednesday :)


	8. Chapter 8

The next few days were among the busiest Barnes had ever experienced: 72 hours of near constant movement and activity, making phone calls, chasing after leads and witness accounts and official reactions and quotes, trying to sort through the entire _gigabytes_ of documents that had been leaked online so as to distribute the load between the different members of their team, reading what one had been assigned, striving to make sense of it all, to uncover the implications, to suss out the possible consequences—because Grant had been right, it _was_ fucking Hydra, and they were _everywhere_. And now Barnes and his team had to deal with the fallout, with nothing but a quick break here and there for a cup of coffee, a short nap, a sandwich that went forgotten half-way through.

That devilish rhythm only slowed down intermittently, whenever another major piece of news rolled in, like when Pierce was taken into custody. He'd been trying to flee the country but had been found out and stopped by none other than Hawkeye, who'd tied him up and stood over him until both the press and the police had shown up.

Barnes watched the footage of the soon-to-be-former Secretary of State being forced into the back of a police car with a deep feeling of vindication.

"You knew," Elle said when they discussed it. "That's why you changed the questions in your interview."

Barnes hesitated, then said, "Yeah."

" _How_?"

"It was Grant—O'Connor," Barnes replied. It was past time he gave credit where credit was due. "He went and looked into Pierce's background, and he felt at once that something was off, and so he started digging and…" He trailed off with a shrug.

"It was O'Connor," Elle repeated slowly. She was reevaluating the events of the past few weeks, Barnes realized: Grant's preoccupation, his frequent and prolonged absences, most of which had been unannounced and unexplained. She was fitting them all into the narrative of an investigation that Grant and Barnes had worked on together and agreed to keep secret.

That wasn't quite how things had happened, but Barnes also realized that this slightly skewed version of the truth might be saving Grant's job. If he still wanted it. If he was still in a state that made it possible for him to want it. So Barnes didn't correct her.

After a while, she asked quietly, "Where is he now?"

"…I don't know," Barnes admitted. His voice didn't waver. He wasn't making anything of it, of the fact that it had been three days and he still hadn't heard anything. Or that whenever he tried to call Grant on his phone, it didn't even ring and went directly to voicemail. Or that the fear that seized him whenever he let himself wonder what that might mean went well past the bounds of the concern one might feel for a simple colleague.

Grant had long since stopped being a simple colleague, though, hadn't he? If he ever had been.

Anyhow, Barnes was determined not to linger on any of that, and so he was glad for the work that kept his mind busy. Which was why he was so dismayed that evening, when Elle had him unceremoniously kicked out of the office with orders not to come back until he'd had a full night of sleep, a good long shower, and at least two copious meals. She liked her employees to be dedicated, but she liked them to be _alive_ and able to work properly even more—which he soon wouldn't be if he went on like he'd been.

Barnes was tempted to argue that an entire night faced with nothing but the empty silence of his flat wouldn't help matters. If anything, it might finish the job and make him go completely crazy.

Fortunately, he didn't have to choose between madness and Elle's ire. When he stepped outside, Falcon was there, leaning against a reasonable sedan. He was dressed as a civilian, with a painful-looking scrap on his cheek and who knew what else hidden under his windbreaker, but he seemed okay, standing and moving unhindered.

"Hey," he greeted when Barnes walked up to him. "You're alive."

"Mostly."

The corner of his mouth lifted. "Aren't we all," he said, and gestured for Barnes to get into the car.

-

Falcon's real name was Sam Wilson. He was a former pararescue who, a couple of years after his discharge, had realized that he wasn't done trying to save people—right around the time he'd stumbled upon a certain vigilante in a pinch.

This Barnes learned as Sam drove them to Stark Tower. By the time they stepped into the elevator, he was left marveling at how close to the truth some of the fans speculating on the internet had come.

The Tower was deserted. Stark, Ms. Rushman, and Hawkeye were all busy, dealing with the fallout of what they'd uncovered and how they'd uncovered it. Dr. Banner had retired into his private floor and was unlikely to come out until things had quieted down.

That wouldn't be for a while. Nick Fury—who indeed hadn't been aware of what was going on until he'd gotten the alert about a security breach—was spitting mad. The U.S. government and military and intelligence agencies weren't much better, torn between accusations of high treason and awkward requests for help to root out the corrupted elements in their midst. And then there was the rest of the world.

Nomad wasn't part of all this. He'd been involved, that much everyone knew from several witness accounts placing him at the Triskelion when everything had been going down. But he hadn't been caught, and he hadn't been heard of or seen since.

Now Barnes was finally told that he was here, at Stark Tower—that he'd _been_ here almost from the start, sleeping. Recovering. He'd done the brunt of the fighting, Sam explained. He'd made himself a target, a distraction, so that Stark and Ms. Rushman could slip in and do their thing unnoticed. It had worked flawlessly: no one had known they'd played a part until they'd come forward themselves and claimed full responsibility for the leak and the operation.

"He was in pretty bad shape," Sam said as they entered the medical wing, "but he should be back on his feet soon. A couple of days tops, the doctors say."

They reached the room, and Barnes stepped inside with his heart knocking against his ribs, making it difficult to breathe. His eyes went to the bed at once—or they meant to, but on the way they caught on an incongruous sight: a large metal disk propped against the IV pole. It was decorated in a pattern of large concentric circles, red on white on red except for the one in the middle, which was blue and branded with a star: a perfect replica of Captain America's shield.

Sam didn't seem to care or even notice its presence. "I'm going to fetch us some coffee," he said, and left.

Barnes was grateful for his tact. Finally, his gaze had settled on Grant, who was asleep. The entire right sight of his face was one giant bruise, the kind that hinted at a cracked cheekbone. His nose had obviously been broken. The rest of him was hidden by his hospital gown and the bedsheets, but Barnes, knot in his throat, wasn't sure he wanted to see.

He had to know, though. He looked around for the chart, which he found lying on a metal table against the wall. What he read on it was about as bad as he'd expected, if not worse. There were mentions of multiple gunshot wounds. Of a cracked skull. Of a bruised spine and dislocated shoulder. Of a broken ankle and sprained knee. Of massive internal bleeding. Incredibly, it hadn't been lethal. But it wasn't anything that could be healed in 'a couple of days tops'.

Unless.

Barnes put down the chart and went to sit down in the chair beside the bed. Once there, he reviewed the evidence.

The recovery rate. The enhancement everyone agreed Nomad had. The expertise on Hydra, which even Tony Stark had accepted without question. The 'having been raised Amish _or something_ '. The way both Stark and Parker kept calling him 'Cap'. The resemblance. And now, the shield.

When one put it all together like that, it was even more obvious than the Nomad thing. It was the last piece of the puzzle, fitting right into place, completing the picture.

"Hey."

Barnes looked up. Grant was awake.

"So it's not just that you look like Captain America," Barnes said slowly. "You _are_ Captain America."

Grant grimaced slightly. "They told you."

"Somehow I was able to put it together myself," Barnes said, and knocked his knuckles against the shield. After that, silence settled. He didn't know what else to say, and Grant wasn't looking at him.

After a while, Barnes sat back in his chair. "What was it, then?" he asked. "Cloning? Time travel?" At this point, he was pretty much resigned to accept any explanation. Aliens and cultist Nazis were a thing, so really, who knew what else might be possible?

"Nothing that fancy," Grant replied. "It's—when I put down the Valkyrie. It was, I don't know, somewhere in the Arctic, it was winter, the ice—it reformed so quickly. It froze the ship almost instantly and I—I was caught in it." He swallowed. "But I didn't die. Because of the serum. I had no idea that'd—no one did, and so when they found the wreck a couple years back—let's just say they were pretty surprised."

"I can imagine," Barnes said. He almost regretted asking. "Guess you were pretty surprised too."

Grant gave him a stiff smile. "You got no idea."

-

They talked a bit more, but Grant was fading fast. By the time Sam returned with two cups of coffee and a few sandwiches on a tray, he was already half asleep.

"Yeah, that's to be expected," Sam said. "His body is working full-time on his recovery. Kind of an all-hands-on-deck situation, of course he won't waste any energy talking to us lowlifes."

Still, they stuck close to the medical wing until they'd finished their drinks and food. Afterwards, Sam showed Barnes back to the bedroom he'd been given before…everything.

And to think, it had happened less than one week ago.

Barnes didn't let himself linger on that thought. He bid Sam goodnight and, now that a major source of worry had been lifted, finally allowed himself to do what Elle had ordered him to. He took a nice, long, warm shower. Then he went to bed.

He slept for close to 16 hours.

He woke up feeling steamrolled, a sensation that only abated slightly when he took a second shower and got dressed, his nose wrinkling at the state of his clothes. Grant was still out when he went up to the medical wing to see him, and he stayed that way until Sam arrived, so they went up a few more floors to have breakfast instead—or rather, lunch. Once that was done, Barnes had no more excuses to stick around: work was calling.

Sam was nice enough to offer to drive him again, and Barnes asked to be dropped at his flat. When they reached it, he thanked Sam, and they exchanged phone numbers so that they could both keep the other informed of the situation. Then Barnes went up to shave and change into a blessedly clean set of clothes.

Before he headed back to the office, he called his sister.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Well," Becca said slowly, "we're nearly a week in and all evidence still points towards my boss being a Nazi. How do you think?"

That wasn't much of a surprise. "At least there’s no evidence pointing towards _you_ being a Nazi?" he said, trying to bring some levity.

"Maybe not. But now we have to look back on all the decisions he made while he was in office, even the brilliant ones, even the ones we all fully approved of, and know that every single one of them might be part of a larger plan meant to undermine our democratic system, weaken our alliances, and destabilize entire world regions. And we have to wonder what that says about us as a country, as agents of the State, as _people_ , that we didn't notice. That we let it happen and go on for so long. That in a way, we even _played along_."

Bucky could hear in her voice how shaken she was and didn't know what to say. How to make it better. He wasn't used to _Becca_ being the one in need of comfort or support.

"Yikes," was all he came up with.

"Yeah," she said with a short laugh, "that about sums it up."

-

Barnes went back to work. He didn't know if it was the fact that he was better rested, or the disappearance of his main preoccupation, or the extra 24 hours, but things seemed to be quieting down some, settling into a rhythm. The amount of effort that lay ahead was still insane, but it was starting to look like it might one day become a _manageable_ level of insane. Suddenly, they could take breaks without having the impression that the ship would sink because they'd stopped bailing for one second. Suddenly, they found small pockets of time to breathe, to think—to branch out.

"Good thinking," Urich said when he caught Barnes in the break room waiting for the coffee machine to work its magic with his nose in a book. "Going back to the source, I should've thought of that." Barnes blinked at him, nonplussed, until he realized that the way he was holding the volume meant that the cover and title were there for everyone to see: _Steven G. Rogers: The Man Before the Shield_ , by Deborah L. Swinton.

Barnes certainly didn't correct his colleague's assumptions as to why he was reading the book. Although he could've pointed out that, had he been looking for information about Hydra, he would've chosen one of the many monographs that focused on Rogers' war years instead of this one.

Ms. Swinton's work wasn't helping him as much as he would've liked with what he was trying to figure out, though. The following day found him frowning down at its pages while he sat at his desk, the lunch in front of him long forgotten.

"What you got here?" a voice asked, and suddenly he felt a presence behind him, a hand coming to rest on the back of his chair, both terribly familiar.

The hair at the back of his neck prickled. His breath caught. He looked up, and there was Grant—Steve? No, Grant, with his thick-framed glasses, his ill-fitting shirt, his coat slung over one arm. He looked fresh as a daisy, too, showing no sign that he'd been shot five times less than two weeks ago.

Bucky swallowed, and wordlessly closed the book so that Grant could see the cover. Grant quirked an eyebrow. "Good choice," he said. "That's one of the less terrible ones."

And just like that, Bucky found his voice again. "You've read your own biographies?"

"Tony got me a bunch of them as a joke."

"Didn't mean you had to read them," Bucky said, and felt bereft when Grant moved away. Fortunately, he didn't go far, stopping by the chair tucked against Bucky's desk.

"Had to find ways to keep busy," he said as he sat down with a wince. "That was back before I came to work here."

"The situation must've been pretty dire," Bucky said. "Are you sure you should be out of bed?"

"Dr. Cho gave me the all clear as long as I don't get up to anything strenuous. Sitting at a desk reading and writing is not strenuous."

" _Right_ ," Bucky said wryly. His lungs were still refusing to work properly for some reason. He glanced down at the book in front of him. "So which part of this thing holds, if it's one of the good ones?"

"Which part do you think?" Grant retorted at once, eyebrows quirking like he knew exactly why Bucky had picked it up in the first place.

Bucky looked at him for a second, at the frank gaze in his bright blue eyes, at the amused smile hovering at the corner of his mouth. He looked at him, and gathered what he knew about him from all the months they'd worked together—because that had to count for something, didn't it? "You were a socialist," he said tentatively. "You went to protests. Got arrested for it, too."

"I did." He grinned, suddenly, and Bucky's thoughts stuttered. _I know you, don't I?_ "Multiple times."

"You lied on your resume," Bucky went on more confidently. "There's nothing in there about you working for a newspaper."

Grant didn't stop grinning. "Not under Steve Rogers' name, no."

Bucky scoffed incredulously. "Fuck, how many aliases do you have?"

"What can I say, I'm like an onion. I have layers."

Bucky froze. "…You've watched _Shrek_."

"Yeah." Grant shrugged. "It seemed important to you, so."

_I do know you_ , Bucky thought, smiling helplessly. _And you know me_.

"O'Connor."

They both startled and turned to see Elle standing there. They hadn't noticed her approach.

"It's so nice of you to finally grace us with your presence," she said, smiling in a way that didn't bode well. With a tiny jerk of her head ordering Grant to follow, she turned away and headed towards her office.

"Okay," Grant said, standing up with another wince, although this time it probably had little to do with pain. "Time to face the music."

"It was nice knowing you," Bucky called as Grant walked away.

"Yeah, yeah, fuck you too, Barnes," Grant retorted.

Bucky watched him go, biting his lips around an irrepressible smile.

-

It took nearly a week of constant nagging, but eventually Bucky got Grant to give him the pseudonym under which he'd written back in the 30s—or rather, drawn. Steve Rogers hadn't been so much a journalist as a cartoonist. His drawings were kind of hilarious, biting and dark and actually going much further in their criticism than any newspaper would dare nowadays, even the satirical ones. That's all they were though: drawings.

"So you _did_ lie on your resume," Bucky said, looking away from the screen and the archive on which he'd found them.

Grant huffed as he fiddled with the pen he'd stolen from Bucky's desk. "In my defense, I tried to tell Tony that what experience I had wasn't as a reporter. He had a hard time understanding that—but then, he believes Bruce is the only doctor he needs, so."

"How was it, though? Working for a newspaper back then?"

"Short-lived," Grant replied with one of his dark-humored smiles. "Although I wished it had lasted longer. I quite liked it there."

Which might explain why he'd wanted to try and come back to it now. "You got laid off?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

Bucky expected an answer revolving around the Great Depression. Grant didn't reply at once, though. He looked at Bucky for a long moment, then took a breath and straightened in the chair, putting the pen down like he'd made a resolution. When he spoke, his voice was low, forcing Bucky to lean in to hear it properly. "A colleague saw me leaving a queer bar in the company of another man and reported me to the boss."

Bucky felt his lips part. "That's…" He trailed off. He didn't know what word to use. Awful? Unfair? Unexpected?

Grant shrugged. "It could've been worse. They could've reported me to the police, gotten me arrested. They could've rounded up some friends or colleagues and beat me up. Being fired without recommendation meant I got off lightly, really."

Bucky swallowed. Much like with Becca, he was at a loss for what to say. The way Grant spoke, his tone almost casual, like what he was referring to was normal, was expected, was _accepted_ …

It was so far away from Bucky's own experience. He'd been born and grown up here in New York, and while he'd always known that there were risks, that he had to be careful, he'd never felt like he couldn't be open about who he was, like he had to hide it in order to be really safe. He'd never been bullied: one jock had made a brief attempt at it at the very beginning of high school, and Bucky had torn down his reputation so thoroughly that no one had dared try anything after that. He'd only been accosted on his way in or out of a gay bar a handful of times, and none of those occurrences had gone awry—at least not for him. When it came to his professional life, the worst he'd experienced had been some nervousness when he'd told Elle, right up until she'd raised her eyebrows and said, " _And_?" like she couldn't see how it mattered. To her, it didn't: his being openly gay hadn't changed a thing. It hadn't even meant that he was assigned all the LGBT-related topics. If possible, he even got them less, unless he requested them specifically: Elle considered him too close to the matter to be entirely impartial. He didn't care. His orientation had never been the militant kind, unless one counted being entirely unapologetic about it as such.

But now here Grant was, talking about the very same city Bucky had spent his whole life in, about a time not so long ago where being who he was and behaving the way he did would've meant being out of a job. It would've meant illegality, violence, maybe even a death sentence.

He couldn't imagine what that had been like. What he would've done, had he been in that situation. How he would've lived. _If_ he would've lived.

"I'm sorry," Bucky said. It sounded much too feeble.

"It's okay," Grant said, even though it really wasn't. "It's in the past. Really, the reason I'm telling you this is because—" He broke off and quickly looked around before leaning in, his arm coming to rest on the edge of Bucky's desk. "I'm telling you this because I want you to understand," he went on, his voice close to a murmur. "You were right, that day. I was jealous."

Bucky was confused, not understanding what day he was referring to. Then he did, but still frowned at the non-sequitur even as he said, "No, I wasn't."

_Grant_ had been the one who'd been right. Pierce hadn't been interested in Bucky's professional merit when he'd approached him. Or, if he had, it had only been in so far as he could make use of it: of Bucky's clout, of his burgeoning reputation as a reporter with a moral fiber who didn't shy from difficult topics and came down on corruption, of the trust people had placed in him and his work as a consequence. As many things Pierce had meant to use to further his own agenda, to deploy his fucking narrative. And yes, he'd made use of his charisma and charm to draw Bucky in—and Bucky had fallen right for it, like a debutante at her first ball seduced by a scoundrel. He'd been too conceited, too blinded by his own ambition to realize that he was being used, or to care if he was.

"Yes, you were," Grant insisted, drawing him out of that spiral of thoughts. "I _was_ jealous. Although…" His eyes flicked to the side as a flush rose to his cheeks. "You know. Not of the person you thought. And…not for the reason you thought."

Bucky's frown deepened, because what other reason could there—

"Oh," he said out loud.

Grant glanced back at him. He was definitely blushing. "Yeah."

"Really?"

"I mean, I was worried about you too—about him using you. Worried and pissed. But…yeah." He gnawed at his lips. "Look, I'm—this doesn't have to be awkward. I don't expect anything, it doesn't _change_ anything. I just—I thought you had the right to know. Since we're being honest and all."

The corner of his mouth rose into a brief smile, there and gone in a second. Bucky watched him for a moment and saw that Grant meant what he'd just said: he wasn't expecting anything. He didn't believe that there was anything _to_ expect.

He was an idiot, for believing that. But not as much of an idiot as Bucky had been for not understanding what this was, on top of all the other things that he hadn't understood; for not noticing the signs. Even now, there were plenty of them. The catch in his breath; the strong beat of his heart against his ribs; the heat rising to his cheeks, making his ears burn.

It was, once again, almost mortifyingly obvious.

"What if—" he said, the words wavering. He had to pause and swallow, but still his voice wasn't quite stable when he went on, "What if I wanted you to expect things?" Grant's brow folded in puzzlement. "What if I wanted it to change things? Between us."

Grant kept frowning, until suddenly his eyes widened. "You mean—"

"Um."

Bucky didn't startle this time. Instead his head whipped around, accompanied by a glare. “What?”

Parker squeaked. "Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Barnes," he said, "but—"

And then he stopped.

"But _what_?"

Parker gulped. "Mrs. Richm—I mean, Elle wants to see you in her office."

"Thanks for the message, Peter," Grant said, taking over before Bucky could start cursing. "We'll be right there." He smiled, and Parker gave a brief, tremulous smile back before turning around and hurrying away.

Once he was gone, Grant glanced back at Bucky with an expression that was both sheepish and amused. Bucky agreed: it would do no good to make Elle wait. That, and they needed to stop trying to have meaningful conversations at the office before it became a habit.

Still Grant said, like he needed the confirmation, the reassurance, "We'll talk more later."

"After work," Bucky said at once. "My place."

Grant nodded. Then they stood up and went to see what Elle wanted.

-

Hilariously enough, what Elle wanted was for them to handle the Avengers. Not the matter of their involvement in the current crisis, but that of their real identities.

"Right now, everyone’s focusing on the parts of the info dump that document Hydra's infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. and its impact on national security and international relations," she explained. "They don't realize what else might be in there—including everything anyone ever wanted to know about the members of that team. That's not a surprise: most people don't know S.H.I.E.L.D. was the one to deploy them against the Chitauri, and the information is probably both hidden and coded. We need to find it, and we need to publish it— _now_ , so that we can secure full exclusivity."

Barnes had…so many questions. Since when did Elle care about headlines pertaining to superheroes? How did _she_ know about the Avengers' connection to S.H.I.E.L.D., since it wasn't public knowledge? And if the information about them was so well hidden, how did she even know that it was there in the first place?

But then she added, "There will be interviews—one-on-one, with every member of the team, spread out over several months. Exclusive too, of course."

There Barnes couldn't _not_ ask, "How the _fuck_ did you manage that?"

Elle quirked an eyebrow at him, a silent _I have my ways_ that would've been unbearably frustrating—except that suddenly Barnes knew how she'd done it. _That_ was the deal she'd brokered with Stark, what she'd obtained from him in exchange for agreeing to hire Grant. All these months Barnes had spent wondering about it, about her and her decisions and her care for the _Bulletin_ , questioning everything and _hating_ it, and it turned out that she'd simply been playing the long game—and fuck it, he _should've known_. He should've trusted her.

He couldn't hold back a delighted grin, shaking his head at her. _Fuck_ if he was going to doubt her decisions ever again.

Especially given that, when she went into more detail about what she expected of them both, another thing became obvious: she definitely knew that Grant was Nomad, maybe even that he was Captain America. It was no coincidence that she was handing that topic over to them specifically. She was giving them a chance to try and control the narrative, maybe even to find a way to preserve Grant's identity here at the _Bulletin_. Not that it would be easy, especially if the truth of it all was written black on white somewhere in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files.

"Oh, no, it’s not," Grant said as Bucky expressed those worries out loud. It was later, after they'd left the office and the door of his flat had closed behind them, finally making it safe to do so. "Or it shouldn't be. There will be reports about the Valkyrie being found and Captain America being alive and being sent out against the Chitauri as Nomad but—not the rest of it."

"How can you be so sure?" Bucky asked, unwrapping his scarf to hang it.

"I—my identity as Grant O'Connor wasn't created by S.H.I.E.L.D.," Grant replied as he did the same. "I mean, sure, Nat and Clint helped. Tony too, as you know. But apart from them, only Fury and Hill knew about it. It was never recorded in the system. That was the deal."

"Deal?"

Grant nodded as he shrugged off his coat and let Bucky take it from him. "With Fury. He let me do my thing unmonitored, and in exchange he'd have my full cooperation in case of an emergency."

"You think he kept his end of the bargain?" Bucky asked as he eased off his shoes. He didn't know much about Nick Fury, but he knew enough to doubt that the man's promises could be trusted.

Although Fury having kept mum would explain some things, like the fact that Pierce hadn't recognized Grant at Stark's Christmas party, even though he had to have known about Captain America being alive and running around New York as Nomad.

"Nat made him," Grant said, "or she tried, at least. I guess we'll have to wait and see if she succeeded." He crouched down to untie his laces.

"You do realize it's only matter of time though, right? Even if there is nothing in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files, eventually people _will_ find out." They'd be determined to. Bucky could only imagine and dread the uproar it would cause when people would discover that New York's favorite vigilante and the most famous superhero in history were one and the same person.

"I know," Grant said without looking up. He sounded subdued.

Bucky understood why. He'd asked, the day Grant had come back to work. It had been late, most of their colleagues gone home already, so that the topic had felt safe enough to broach. Bucky had asked Grant if he wanted Bucky to start thinking of him as Steve. Almost immediately, Grant had shaken his head.

"I wouldn't slip up," Bucky had said.

"That's not why," Grant had replied. "It's—I'm not that guy anymore. I'm not the man I was back before the war, before the serum. Hell, I'm not even the man who went into the ice. So that name—Grant O'Connor." He'd shrugged. "I don't know, it seems fitting. Appropriate."

"A new name for a new life," Bucky had said.

"Yeah." Grant had smiled: obviously it was a life he'd come to enjoy. And so of course he'd be dismayed at the thought that it might all be blown to smithereens. That people might find out the truth, might reach out and cling and drag him back towards Steve Rogers, towards Captain America, after all the efforts he'd made to leave them behind, to build a new life in the here and now instead of remaining stuck in the past.

Once his laces were undone, Grant took off his shoes and straightened up. "It might be alright though," he said, infusing optimism into his voice. "After all, every single one of Sam's colleagues and patients at the VA know about Falcon, but they're sure as hell giving a good impression of having no idea."

Bucky wasn't surprised to hear that. Anyone who'd spent any kind of time around Sam Wilson would see right through Falcon's costume at once: that dazzling smile of his was a dead giveaway. But of course he'd inspire the kind of loyalty that meant his secret was safe anyway.

"Nomad's costume is more covering, too," Bucky said, heading towards the kitchen. "And your identity is well-established at the _Bulletin_ , so who knows. It might never occur to people to wonder."

And even if it did and they figured out the truth, Elle's recent decisions made it clear what their reaction would have to be—that is to say, non-existent.

"We'll just have to wait and see," Grant said again, a bit belatedly.

"I guess. In the meantime, can I offer you something to drink?" Bucky asked as he opened a cupboard.

Grant didn't reply. Instead he said, in the strangest voice, "Buck."

Bucky frowned and glanced back, only to see Grant still standing in the entryway, a complicated expression on his face. It was lined with what looked like pleading, and suddenly Bucky remembered what they'd been meaning to talk about once the work day was over and they were back at his place.

"Right," he said, and looked down at the glass he was holding. He carefully put it on the counter: his grip didn't feel secure. "Let's recap." He swallowed, took a breath, and turned around. Grant hadn't moved. "Pierce approached me, started—well, flirting with me to try and get me on board of his propaganda machine and—you got jealous. And angry. And worried. But mostly jealous." He started walking back towards Grant. "So much so that you started a rogue investigation on the man and, long story short, discovered that he had an evil plan and took him down along with his entire organization." He stopped in front of Grant and tilted his head up to meet his eyes. "Some people would call that an overreaction."

Grant swallowed. "Peggy keeps saying I'm too dramatic," he said in a breathy voice, and Bucky _wanted_. He wanted very much.

"I think we're past dramatic at this point." He lifted a hand to lay it on Grant's chest and pushed, testing. Grant didn't offer any resistance, just let himself be moved until his back hit the wall. Bucky couldn't hold back a smile.

"I guess we are," Grant said. His lips were parted, his eyes wide, never leaving Bucky's.

Bucky leaned in. "Glad to hear you agree with me for once," he murmured and, as a reward, he closed the rest of the distance between them and kissed him.

Grant let out a noise and kissed back at once. His hands flailed, then settled on Bucky's waist, on his hips, tugging him closer as the kiss deepened. Bucky went along with it, until they were pressed together, touching from knee to chest. He shivered: Grant was warm as a furnace, broad and solid against him, every touch a delightful thrill.

By the time they had to part for air, Bucky was panting, almost choking on all the things he wanted to do to this man—and _fuck_ , it had been so long since he'd felt that way, about anyone. So long that, when their eyes met, Bucky knew at once that if they kissed again he wouldn't be able to stop.

"Buck," Grant said. He looked about as wrecked as Bucky felt, but his hands were still resting politely on Bucky's waist. They hadn't moved, and all at once Bucky knew that they _wouldn't_ move, not until Bucky had given a clear sign that they could and should. Grant was handing over the reins. He was letting Bucky decide whether they should take a step back now, because they probably still needed to talk, or—

Or.

"Fuck this," Bucky said, and kissed Grant again.

After all, there would be plenty of time for them to talk later.

-

Bucky was still gasping when Grant rolled off him, still tingling all over, still stunned, because _holy fuck_. He knew it had been a long time but—

Holy _. Fuck_.

"I can't—" he panted after a while, "I can't believe you tried to make me believe you'd never done this before."

"I haven't," Grant said, not sounding much better than Bucky did. "Not this way around, at least." With an effort, he managed to turn onto his side, his arm flopping across Bucky's chest. "That—that just wasn't what the men who showed an interest in me were after, back in the day. And yeah, there was Peggy later on, after—but that's not quite the same, you know?"

"No, I don't," Bucky replied frankly. He'd never had any doubts about his sexual orientation and so had never seen the point in forcing himself to try anything with a girl. Which was probably for the best, both for him and for the woman who would've ended up unwittingly drawn into that dubious experiment.

"So…it was okay?" Grant asked, in an unexpected show of insecurity that made Bucky blink at him for a second.

The nice thing would've been to reassure him at once. To tell him that it had been great. It wouldn't have been a lie: the experience had been…quite mind-blowing. Bucky was still reeling from it.

But he wasn't and hadn't ever been _nice_.

"Oh, I don't know," he said loftily.

Fortunately, Grant knew him. "You don't?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow as his broad hand slid down to cup Bucky's thigh and tug.

"I don't," Bucky assured, letting himself be drawn closer and tilting his face up. "I definitely need more data."

Grant’s leg slid in between his. "Do you, now," he murmured. His nose nudged against Bucky's. Their lips were almost touching.

Bucky hummed. "Yes, I do. This matter obviously requires a very thorough investigation."

“You think?” Grant asked as his hand slowly stroked up the back of Bucky’s thigh.

“I don’t think, I _know_. I’m an investigative reporter,” Bucky reminded him. “And I’m _very_ dedicated to my job.”

"That you are," Grant said, and _finally_ kissed him again.

Bucky kissed back eagerly, once, twice, slung an arm across Grant's shoulders to hitch himself closer and—almost startled when there was a sudden scratch against the door, followed by an angry meow.

Alpine. Whom he'd forgotten to feed, despite having come home early for once.

He let himself fall back on the mattress with a groan. Grant followed, burying his face at the junction between Bucky’s shoulder and neck. "Cat food's still in the cupboard?" he asked after a few seconds.

"Yeah," Bucky replied, and stared fatalistically at the ceiling while Grant dropped a kiss on his clavicle and drew back to stand and leave the room. Left alone on the bed, Bucky almost shivered at the coolness of the air, almost pouted—until he recognized this opportunity for what it was.

Grant came back in under a minute. He paused in the doorway, staring at Bucky and at the now artful display of Bucky’s limbs languidly lying amongst the rumpled sheets.

Bucky smirked, staring right back: the view was certainly enjoyable. "I can't believe you wanted to feed him _giblets_ ," he said.

"Uh?" Grant replied, like he had no idea what they were talking about. Bucky's smirk widened.

It took several seconds for the dots to connect and for Grant to start moving again. "That's what we gave them," he said, making his way back onto the bed. "And actually, you know what? I stand by it. It prevented a lot of waste."

"You and your waste," Bucky muttered, rolling his eyes, but deep down he was simply thrilled that they could still tease each other that way. Just like he was thrilled when Grant settled down right against him, when his hand came to rest on Bucky's waist like he didn't even have to think about it, like he just wanted to be touching Bucky and knew that he could.

"Can't complain if it's true," Grant said.

Bucky ran his fingers along Grant's arm, up to his shoulder. "You do realize _you're_ the one being wasteful right now, right?"

"Oh, am I?"

"Yeah, wasting a good opportunity to shut up."

Okay, so it wasn't his best dig, but Grant didn't seem to mind. Instead he grinned. "Ah, but you know that's not something I've ever been good at," he said. "You might even say it goes against my very nature."

"I guess it's my duty as your partner to help you with that, then," Bucky said, his hand curling around the back of Grant's neck and drawing him down for another kiss. He made it as filthy as he could, nipping at Grant's lips and digging his nails into Grant’s nape because he thought he'd noticed—and yes, he'd been right: Grant's breath hitched, and his hold tightened, his body pressing down against Bucky, going a little wild. So Bucky bit him again, and dragged his nails down, kept testing and pushing and suddenly Grant drew back, looking frazzled. "Bucky," he said, something like a warning in his voice, tangled in a whine. Bucky thought that it meant he was conceding defeat, but then Grant shifted, and that was his cock, nudging Bucky's hip, fully hard again already—a warning indeed, but a warning that didn't work the way Grant intended. A wave of heat spread through Bucky. "Yes," he hissed, "yes, _again,_ " and he was parting his legs, hitching his hips up, urging Grant on. He was still loose from earlier so there was no need for any prep, Grant could slide right back in. They didn't even need to fumble for a condom, since with the serum Grant couldn't catch or transmit anything, and Bucky had never minded a mess. More than that, right now he _wanted_ the mess, just like he wanted that delightful mix of pleasure and pain as Grant did what he asked and entered him again. The drag was a bit more pronounced than Bucky had expected, though, and the thought flickered through his mind that maybe they should've taken the time to at least get more lube—but no, actually. No. He'd be sore as hell tomorrow but oh, he _wanted_ to be sore, he wanted to _feel_ it, and to still be feeling it several days down the line.

His eyelids fluttered, and he sighed as Grant bottomed out, shifted slightly and shivered.

"Okay?" Grant asked, his voice a whisper.

"Okay," Bucky said. He stole another kiss and smiled as Grant began to move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter / Epilogue coming right up! :)


	9. Chapter 9

The funny thing was, Bucky got his Pulitzer in the end. The whole team did, for their work on the S.H.I.E.L.D. Papers. As they received the joint prize, Bucky got a special mention as the leader of the team and for the stark portrait he'd made of one Alexander G. Pierce—but nothing more.

He was okay with it. Writing that piece had been a reward in itself, and by now Bucky was more than willing to acknowledge that the rest of the team deserved praise as much as he did. Which didn't mean that he didn't fully enjoy the compliments he received during the reception following the award ceremony.

"You deserve it," Becca said, and drew him into a hug. She'd come up to New York especially for the occasion and looked beautiful in her evening dress. "Where’s your partner, though? I wanted to give him my praise too."

"He's around somewhere," Bucky said, although when he glanced around Grant was nowhere to be seen. Instead his gaze caught on Elle, who was speaking to an editor from the _New York Times_ with her husband Emmett at her side. He always accompanied her to events. Bucky remembered noticing that, remembered watching them evening after evening, remembered feeling almost envious. Not for the man himself, but for what his presence and obvious affection for Elle implied: that on top of being a brilliant journalist and editor-in-chief, successful and respected, she also had countless friends and allies and most of all a partner who loved her and supported her no matter what—whereas Bucky had still been struggling, half-desperate for recognition, for a breakthrough, and apparently incapable of not alienating every single person he ever met or worked with.

"Hey there," a voice said, snapping him out of his thoughts. He turned, and there was Grant, looking splendid in a suit that fit him properly for once—Bucky had insisted, and couldn't be further from regretting it. He was carrying two champagne flutes, one of which he handed to Bucky like he knew the previous one had run dry not a minute ago.

"Congratulations, partner," Grant said cheekily, raising his glass.

"Congratulations," Bucky replied with a smile. They clinked their glasses together, and Bucky couldn't resist tugging Grant closer by his lapel, drawing him in for a kiss.

Grant didn't seem to mind, even slipped in a bit of tongue, and when they parted he stuck close, arm settling around Bucky's waist as he accepted Becca's congratulations and they segued into conversation. As a consequence, Bucky felt it clearly when Grant stilled a dozen minutes later.

He glanced up, and sure enough Grant had that slightly fixed look on his face, which Bucky now knew meant he was listening to the small, nearly invisible earpiece tucked inside his ear: another one of Stark's gadgets, one which relayed any major emergency notice that ran through police channels or showed up on social media—and _boy_ , did Bucky want to take a look at the algorithm that made _that_ possible.

For now, though, he faked a put-upon sigh. "What is it," he said, "what did you forget this time?"

Grant threw him a rueful glance. "Did we close and lock the bathroom window before we left?"

Bucky almost snorted. That window had become one of Grant's preferred excuses ever since they'd moved into their new flat. The bathroom there was quite small—it was the place's main downside, really—with bad aeration, which meant that they had to open the window for a few minutes after every shower unless they wanted to start harvesting mold. It wasn't hard to believe that they might forget about it and leave it that way by accident. Just like it wasn't hard to believe that they might want to go back just to close and lock it, since this was New York.

"I don't know, did you?" Bucky asked. "You were the last one in there."

"Only because you took so long to get ready," Grant retorted.

"You can't rush perfection." Bucky quirked an eyebrow. "But let me guess, you won't be able to let it rest until you've checked, will you?"

"Well…" Grant trailed off. Bucky let out another sigh. Grant ducked in for a conciliatory kiss, which Bucky condescended to be mellowed by.

"Fine," he said. "Off with you, then."

With a last squeeze of his hand, Grant went.

"You know," Becca said as they watched him go, "he doesn't actually need to make up all these ridiculous excuses. I'm sure everyone would understand. So this kind of events and most social situations make him feel uncomfortable, or anxious, or—or claustrophobic. So what? Really, there’s no need for him to _pretend_."

" _Becks_ ," Bucky said. "Surely you're smart enough to realize the pretense isn't for your sake or anyone else's as much as for his."

Becca stared at him for a second. "The Amish really did a number on him, didn't they?" she eventually said.

"As he'd be the first to tell you, he's got everything under control," Bucky said.

If Grant didn't, he probably would soon: he hadn't left the scene in any kind of real hurry, which meant that even though the situation had been enough to activate the relay system Stark had set up, it probably wasn't anything too serious. Hopefully it wasn't. Hopefully this wouldn't turn into one of the bad nights, and it wouldn't exhaust Grant either. Hopefully it'd be the kind of issue that was easy enough to resolve, but was still enough to get Grant's blood running, to build an edge that he'd still need to work off once he came back to their flat—and found Bucky waiting.

"Besides, you know I'll make sure he's okay later," Bucky added. Imagining it, he felt his mouth curl into that smug smile that he knew his colleagues hated, because they all knew perfectly well what it meant. Becca didn't mind it. Sure, she rolled her eyes, but mostly she was happy for him.

It didn't mean that she wasn't glad when someone called for attention to make a speech, derailing their conversation entirely. Bucky didn't complain and turned to listen—although one thing was sure: he couldn't wait to be home.

-

_END_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... And this is how Niitza wrote a 50k Stucky fic while only using the name Steve 5 times :P
> 
> Comments remains as welcome as ever, let me know what you thought!

**Author's Note:**

> [Here is the tumblr post](https://princessniitza.tumblr.com/post/190535906726/ca-fic-strange-visitor-from-another-time-99) if you still do the whole reblogging thing :)


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